A financial analysis by HSBC bank states that OpenAI will need to close a $207 billion (€179 billion) gap by 2030 in order to pay for its expansion plans. Data center leases are piling up, but revenues are lagging far behind expenditures.
According to HSBC, OpenAI’s free cash flow (the money left over after all costs have been paid) will amount to approximately $282 billion by 2030. An additional $26 billion will come from Nvidia’s commitments and the sale of AMD shares. Add to that $24 billion in unused debt and equity facilities and $17.5 billion in available cash.
That sounds like a lot of money, but it’s not enough. Compared to the $792 billion that OpenAI will have to pay for data centers between now and 2030, there remains a shortfall of $207 billion. Including a safety buffer of $10 billion, that gap rises to $217 billion.
Data center rent of $620 billion per year
HSBC notes that OpenAI has closed two major deals in recent months: a $250 billion cloud computing deal with Microsoft and a $38 billion deal with Amazon. These contracts add four gigawatts of computing power, bringing the total to 36 gigawatts. The annual rental price amounts to $620 billion. Only a third of that capacity is expected to be available by the end of this decade.
OpenAI is therefore paying sky-high amounts for infrastructure that is not even fully operational yet. These investments are necessary to keep the AI models running and to continue developing them. The only question is: how is the company going to pay for all this?
Too few paying users
HSBC predicts that OpenAI will have around three billion users by 2030, representing 44 percent of the adult world population outside China. That’s where the problem lies: the company needs to persuade this mass of people to pay for subscriptions.
OpenAI currently has around 800 million users, of whom only 5% pay. HSBC expects this percentage to rise to ten percent by 2030. In addition, the company is counting on revenue from advertising and agentic AI. Nevertheless, revenue will continue to lag far behind costs. OpenAI will continue to subsidize its users well into the next decade.
Enormous growth or forced cutbacks
HSBC calculates that every additional 500 million users will generate approximately $36 billion in revenue. If OpenAI can get 20% of users to pay instead of 10%, that adds up to $194 billion. However, it remains to be seen whether such scenarios are realistic.
If revenues fall short and investors become wary, OpenAI will have to make choices. HSBC argues that OpenAI may have to negotiate to exit its data center lease early. “Less capacity is always better than a liquidity crisis,” the bank says.