OpenAI IPO Prospectus Reveals Q1 2026: Revenue Tripled, Losses Widened
TL;DR
OpenAI's S-1 IPO financials are public: Q1 revenue tripled to $5.7 billion, but non-GAAP operating margin hit -122%. ChatGPT weekly users stalled near 905 million, Anthropic is only $900 million behind, and the IPO target remains $1 trillion.
OpenAI’s S-1 IPO prospectus financial details became public this week. Q1 2026 revenue came in at $5.7 billion, three times the figure from a year earlier. Over the same period, the company posted a non-GAAP operating margin of -122%: for every dollar earned, it lost $1.22.
The filing was submitted confidentially to the SEC in May and announced publicly in early June. It took until this week for analysts to fully unpack the numbers. Ed Zitron’s analysis points out that the -122% figure is the non-GAAP version, stripping out large non-cash items. The GAAP picture is worse.
ChatGPT Growth Has Stalled
Weekly active users peaked at 920 million in February 2026, but averaged just 905 million across Q1. March numbers declined from February. OpenAI had previously set a target of one billion weekly users by end of 2025. Nobody is citing that goal anymore.
Paying customers reached 55 million, roughly 6% of weekly actives, up from 2.6% a year ago. The improvement reflects cheaper subscription tiers like the $5–$8/month Go plan, not a meaningful increase in willingness to pay. Lower-priced entry points boosted headcount while compressing average revenue per user.
Anthropic Is Closing the Gap
Anthropic posted roughly $4.8 billion in Q1 revenue, putting it just $900 million behind OpenAI. Anthropic’s Q2 projection reaches $10.9 billion, and the gap could narrow further before summer ends.
OpenAI projects $30 billion in full-year 2026 revenue alongside $36.6 billion in losses. Hardware, electricity, and data center costs dominate the expense structure. R&D headcount alone consumed $8.6 billion in Q1. Cash and marketable securities stand at over $73 billion, but most of that came from fundraising rather than from operating cash flows.
IPO Still on Track for September
Despite the numbers, OpenAI has not wavered on timing. The company targets a September 2026 listing on the New York Stock Exchange at approximately $1 trillion valuation, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading the offering. The confidential S-1 submission last month was the formal starting gun.
The investor logic draws from Amazon’s playbook: AWS burned cash for years before becoming the engine of Amazon’s profitability. AI infrastructure margins should improve as scale increases, with breakeven expected around 2029–2030. The question worth asking is whether compute costs will keep rising in step with revenue, making that margin improvement harder to reach.
That tension between growth and cost structure is what IPO investors will have to price in September.
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