Open AI CFO: Use Scalable Compute as a Competitive Advantage

AI is advancing at a rapid scale and leaders are placing bets on what will help their companies take the extra step to stay ahead of competitors.

Executives of the world’s biggest tech firms are trying to strike the balance between the need for continued investment alongside growing revenue and growing AI capability.

OpenAI’s Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar is among the latest to discuss this, sharing in a post on LinkedIn: “In periods of rapid technological change, there’s often a temptation to frame ambition at risk.”

She added that OpenAI makes valuable decisions: “Access to reliable, scalable compute isn’t nice-to-have in this phase of AI. It’s a competitive advantage. And like any foundational infrastructure, it requires foresight, commitment and the balance sheet to support it.

“We’ve been intentional about building a model where revenue, reinvestment and capability advance together, so growth is earned, not subsidised and upside scales as intelligence becomes more useful in the real economy.”

Building a business that scales with the value of intelligence 

Writing in an OpenAI blog post on 18 January, Sarah shared the successes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT to date. What started as a “research preview to understand what would happen if we put frontier intelligence directly into people’s hands”, has grown into a platform that students use when they’re stuck on homework, writers use to help with writer’s block and every day people use to understand things going on in their lives.

Sarah wrote: “Then they brought that to work. At first it showed up in small ways. A draft refined before a meeting. A spreadsheet checked one more time.”

This led to finance teams “modeling scenarios with greater clarity” and managers “prepared for hard conversations with better context”.

The CFO credits human use for changing this “tool for curiosity” into infrastructure that helps people operate at a higher level.

But behind the hands typing on their keyboards and voices speaking into their phones, the intelligence transition is down to OpenAI, closing the distance “between where intelligence is advancing and how individuals, companies and countries actually adopt and use it”.

OpenAI runs by a simple strategy: adapting to the needs of the users. “As people demanded more capability and reliability, we introduced consumer subscriptions,” Sarah explained. “As AI moved into teams and workflows, we created workplace subscriptions and added usage-based pricing so costs scale with real work getting done.”

The same principle has been applied to commerce, assisting people with what to buy and what sites to go to.

Financial success explaining where investment belongs

Financial results clearly show the success of the company’s growth and expansion, with the Finance Chief explaining that she leads with a simple value: “Monetisation should feel native to the experience. If it does not add value, it does not belong.”

Sarah explains OpenAI’s successful cycle: stronger models allow better products to allow broader adoption, adoption that drives revenue which “funds the next wave of compute and innovation”.

This has resulted in Weekly Active Users and Daily Active Users being at an all time high.

Revenue rejects this circular growth pattern. Revenue grew 10 times from 2023 to 2025, with annual recurring revenue of US$2bn in 2023, US$6bn in 2024 and over US$20bn in 2025.

Sarah adds, the focus for 2026 is “practical adoption”. “The priority is closing the gap between what AI now makes possible and how people, companies and countries are using it day to day,” she added.

The CFO concluded the blog by saying: “Infrastructure expands what we can deliver. Innovation expands what intelligence can do. Addition expands who can use it. Revenue funds the next leap.

“This is how intelligence scales and becomes a foundation for the global economy.”