---
title: "OpenAI resets spending expectations, tells investors compute target is around $600 billion by 2030"
description: "OpenAI’s lowered plan still called for $600 billion in compute spending and more than twentyfold revenue growth by 2030. “Reset” is doing heroic work."
author: "Pau Friedman"
kind: "link"
published_at: "2026-02-24"
url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/02/24/openai-resets-spending-expectations"
markdown_url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/02/24/openai-resets-spending-expectations.md"
canonical_url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/02/24/openai-resets-spending-expectations"
external_url: "https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/20/openai-resets-spend-expectations-targets-around-600-billion-by-2030.html"
---

# [OpenAI resets spending expectations\, tells investors compute target is around \$600 billion by 2030](<https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/20/openai-resets-spend-expectations-targets-around-600-billion-by-2030.html>)

OpenAI reduced its compute target from $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments to $600 billion
of spending by 2030, which CNBC describes as resetting expectations. More revealingly, the company
expects revenue to rise from $13.1 billion in 2025 to more than $280 billion in 2030. At this scale,
“lower expectations” does not mean plausible. It means less cosmological.

AI can be genuinely useful without making any of these projections sane. A good technology can still
be a bad capital structure; utopia and bankruptcy are not the only possible outcomes.