HSBC says OpenAI could need more than $200 billion in additional funding by 2030 to sustain its rapid expansion, warning that the company’s scale-up may outpace even aggressive revenue growth.
HSBC’s analysis, detailed in reporting by the Financial Times, projects that OpenAI will remain unprofitable through the decade as compute requirements, cloud commitments, and infrastructure spending continue to rise. Under the bank’s base case, OpenAI may require roughly $207 billion in fresh capital by 2030. The bank ties the gap largely to the cost of building and renting large-scale datacenter capacity needed to run frontier models.
The report models $792 billion in infrastructure spending between 2025 and 2030 and as much as $1.4 trillion by 2033. HSBC estimates that about $620 billion of that total could come from long-term datacenter rental and cloud capacity purchases. Its assumptions include large cloud commitments: approximately $250 billion with Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and $38 billion with Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) as part of a targeted 36 gigawatts of compute capacity. These figures represent HSBC’s modelling inputs and do not reflect spending disclosed by OpenAI itself.
Despite the projected funding gap, HSBC expects OpenAI’s business to scale rapidly. The bank’s scenario anticipates revenue climbing to $213 billion by 2030 and total users reaching around 3 billion, a level equal to roughly 44% of the global adult population. HSBC frames these numbers as optimistic but plausible if adoption accelerates across consumer, enterprise, and developer markets.
Independent reporting reinforces the view that OpenAI is forecasting major user expansion. Reuters, citing internal projections reported by The Information, says OpenAI expects about 220 million paying users by 2030, equal to a conversion rate of roughly 8.5%. These forecasts come from internal company modelling rather than HSBC’s analysis.
The financial strain on OpenAI has already carried consequences for Microsoft, one of its largest backers. Microsoft reported a $3.1 billion negative impact on its net income in its fiscal Q1 2026 results tied directly to its OpenAI investment. Public disclosures and press reporting indicate Microsoft holds roughly a 27% stake in the company following OpenAI’s October restructuring.
That stake size implies — though neither company has confirmed it — that OpenAI’s total quarterly loss could be on the order of $11.5 billion, based on a pro-rata extrapolation of Microsoft’s reported hit. Analysts caution that the figure is only an inference because Microsoft did not disclose OpenAI’s overall loss.
Read: Microsoft filing implies $11.5B loss for OpenAI
HSBC also notes that its model relies heavily on assumptions about user growth and the flexibility of OpenAI’s cloud agreements. Any renegotiation or slower adoption could reduce the projected funding requirement, while faster adoption or higher compute density could push costs above the bank’s base case.
Even so, HSBC concludes that OpenAI faces a scale-up challenge with few historical parallels, in which model quality and demand grow faster than the infrastructure needed to support them.
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