OpenAI shut down its Sora video generation product on March 24, 2026, roughly six months after launch, citing poor performance with only 2.14 million in revenue against massive compute costs and declining downloads.
OpenAI killed Sora on March 24, 2026, roughly six months after launch. The same week, according to a person familiar with the matter, the company completed initial training of its next major model, codenamed Spud The Information. Those two facts are not obviously compatible — and they are the real story.
Sora peaked at 3.3 million downloads in November 2025 and fell to 1.1 million by February, according to Appfigures data Wired. It grossed $2.14 million across 11.7 million total downloads — a rounding error against the compute costs of training a frontier video model Ars Technica. Disney, which had announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI, was reportedly blindsided by the shutdown Wired. Reuters reported the transaction never closed Reuters, two people familiar with the matter said, and no money changed hands.
The numbers are not unambiguous. OpenAI generated $13.1 billion in revenue in 2025 and is on pace for $25 billion in 2026 CNBC. Codex, OpenAI's AI-powered coding agent, surpassed $1 billion in annualized revenue in January and is still growing — by some measures the division doing the most to justify the valuation Wired. ChatGPT has 900 million weekly active users CNBC. But the company is still losing money at a scale that makes the revenue growth look like a down payment.
OpenAI recently told investors it is targeting approximately $600 billion in total compute spend through 2030, down from earlier commitments reportedly in the range of $1.4 trillion CNBC. CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC the company needs "to build a company ready to be a public company" CNBC — language that amounts to an IPO confirmation without the filing. The fresh capital brings total raised to north of $120 billion CNBC, including commitments from a16z, D.E. Shaw, MGX, TPG, T. Rowe Price, and Microsoft.
What OpenAI is now describing internally as its "focus era" amounts to a narrowing of ambition in public-facing product. Fidji Simo, a senior leader, told employees to stop being distracted by side quests and pivot to coding and business users Axios. Vice President of Research Jerry Tworek left in January after struggling to get resources for his next big bet Wired. The company is folding its safety team into the research organization under Chief Research Officer Mark Chen while moving security under the scaling division run by co-founder Greg Brockman Observer. Sam Altman stepped down as chairman of Helion Energy on March 23 Observer and has relinquished direct oversight of safety and security teams to focus on capital, supply chains, and datacenters.
And yet Spud is being completed. The company is narrowing its product scope while continuing to push at the research frontier. Whether those ambitions remain compatible under a $600 billion compute budget is the central question this company will need to answer before it can credibly file for an IPO.