OpenAI is reportedly spending an estimated $15 million per day, or $5.4 billion annually, to power its new Sora video generation app, according to an analysis by Forbes. This high operational cost, which Forbes noted would be equivalent to more than a quarter of the company’s projected $20 billion annual recurring revenue, comes as the AI firm reportedly lost over $12 billion last quarter.
I would like to clarify a few things.
First, the obvious one: we do not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI datacenters. We believe that governments should not pick winners or losers, and that taxpayers should not bail out companies that make bad business decisions or…
— Sam Altman (@sama) November 6, 2025
The estimates, which OpenAI declined to comment on, are based on analyst calculations and app usage data. The Sora app, which launched on iOS in September, reached 4.5 million downloads by Halloween. Forbes cited an estimate from Deepak Mathivanan of Cantor Fitzgerald, who calculated that a standard 10-second Sora video costs OpenAI approximately $1.30 to generate, a figure that analyst AJ Kourabi of SemiAnalysis deemed “reasonable.”
Forbes arrived at the $15 million daily figure by estimating that if 25% of Sora’s 4.5 million users post an average of 10 videos a day, it would result in 11.3 million daily videos. This high burn rate was seemingly confirmed by OpenAI’s head of Sora, Bill Peebles, who stated on October 30 that “The economics are currently completely unsustainable.”
Analysts described the strategy as a “classic internet playbook” of absorbing significant losses to capture market share and build user engagement. The free access also allows OpenAI to gather massive amounts of valuable training data, as users provide text prompts for the videos Sora creates. Analysts also noted that the cost of video generation is expected to decrease significantly over the next year, with Mathivanan estimating it could get five times cheaper by 2026.
