OpenAI confidential IPO documents exposed: story of 'light assets' supported by off balance sheet commitments of 665 billion yuan According to Beating monitoring, The Information exclusively obtained and reviewed the confidential IPO registration application draft submitted by OpenAI. The detailed financial notes in the prospectus show that as of March 31, 2026, OpenAI's balance sheet is very similar to that of a light asset software company, with zero debt on paper, lease liabilities of less than $750 million, and quarterly capital expenditures of only $46 million (even lower than enterprise software service provider Salesforce). But in reality, OpenAI has kept its massive infrastructure spending off balance sheet, with future chip, energy, and data center procurement commitments of up to $665 billion. The actual net loss for the first quarter was still as high as approximately $8.5 billion (excluding non cash accounting expenses for stock warrants that skyrocketed due to valuation), while the quarterly revenue cost reached $3.5 billion, which is 75 times the capital expenditure. OpenAI exhibits extremely high internal circulation characteristics of funds. 72% of OpenAI's revenue cost and 45% of total expenses in the first quarter were paid to related parties (primarily or likely Microsoft). During the same period, OpenAI received $758 million in revenue from related parties (12 times that of the same period last year), and directly settled its computing power bills with $488 million worth of equity, without using cash throughout the entire process. The huge off balance sheet procurement commitments and complex on balance sheet joint venture structure further increase the difficulty of penetrating OpenAI's financial transparency. The income statement shows that in the data center joint venture project controlled and consolidated by OpenAI (most likely related to the Stargate project in collaboration with SoftBank and Oracle), nearly $5 billion in losses in the first quarter were attributed to external partners in accounting. Another competitor undergoing off balance sheet expansion is Anthropic. According to the documents, Anthropic has committed to paying $4.5 billion to data center service provider Fluidstack in the coming years, with chip supplier Broadcom providing payment guarantees for Anthropic's $35 billion chip order leased from Google.