How does OpenAI allocate its compute?

OpenAI spent ~$7 billion on compute last year — most of this went to R&D

OpenAI spent ~$7 billion on compute last year. Most of this went to R&D, meaning all research, experiments, and training. Only a minority of this R&D compute went to the final training runs of released models.

Overall compute spend is from media accounts of OpenAI’s investor reporting. We estimated training costs for released models using evidence on GPT-4.5’s training cluster and compute estimates for other models. These likely add up to <$1 billion, compared to a ~$5B R&D total.

This Data Insight was written by Josh You. See our website for more details!