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OpenAI's first $1 billion month

Author

Eddie Yoon
August 20, 2025 • Read time: 8 minutes

👋 Good morning/evening (wherever you are). It’s Wednesday.

OpenAI just crossed its first $1 billion revenue month.

The milestone highlights staggering demand, yet CFO Sarah Friar says the company is “constantly under compute,” with growth capped not by customers but by access to GPUs and power.

Sam Altman has already warned that keeping pace will require unprecedented spending on data centers.

Partnerships with Microsoft, Oracle, and CoreWeave may help, but the contest is no longer about who builds the best models.

It’s about who secures the energy, hardware, and infrastructure to run them at scale.

OK let’s keep going ↓

🔥 Creative pulse

Speaking of OpenAI…it seems like they’re always clashing with Meta. Or it’s really just Altman and Zuck, right?

Well, check out this video starring both of them. It’s a remake of the legendary Neo vs. Agent Smith subway scene. Honestly, it’s the best AI fight video I’ve ever seen.

Andrew Tsytsenko just set a new benchmark for AI action scenes.

PS: If you’re passionate (and obsessed) about AI creative…guess what?! I just launched an AI creative club. It’s only $5/month. Skip the Big Mac and use it for this instead. I’m serious, you’ll thank me later. Click here to join.

One of the top creative minds in the club just dropped their full Weavy workflow for a recent video and it’s insane to see.

💡 Here’s what you should know

Also, here’s Boston Dynamics showing proper lifting form:

💰 The numbers

  • FieldAI raised $405M at a $2B valuation to develop robot “brains,” backed by Bezos Expeditions, NVIDIA, Temasek, Khosla Ventures, and others.

  • Character.AI is exploring either a new fundraising round at a $1B valuation or a possible sale amid rising operational costs and legal scrutiny.

  • KnowledgeLake secured $65M to deliver AI-native "synthetic labor" solutions tailored to mid-sized enterprises and government agencies.

  • Seemplicity raised $50M to expand its AI-driven exposure management platform globally.

  • TinyFish raised $47M Series A in a round led by ICONIQ Capital to expand its AI-driven web agents for enterprise automation.

  • Upstage raised $45M Series B bridge (Amazon, AMD, Korea Development Bank) to scale its Solar LLM, document AI tools, and expand in US and APAC.

  • Bluefish, an AI marketing platform that optimizes advertiser visibility in LLM search results, raised $20M in Series A funding.

  • Phoebe, a UK-based AI platform specializing in fixing software failures via AI agents, raised $17M in a seed round backed by Alphabet’s VC arm.

  • Develop Health raised $14.3M Series A (Wing VC-led) to use GenAI for automating prior authorization and medication access.

  • Cascala Health raised $8.6M Seed, using AI to help healthcare providers summarize patient data for improved post-hospital care.

  • SRE.ai launched today with $7.2M in initial funding to boost productivity for software teams using AI-powered DevOps automation tools.

🧠 Thought starters

Don’t let Google’s Pixel phone headlines distract you from what the company is really becoming.

Google is evolving from a tech company into an energy strategist.

Its bet on advanced nuclear makes clear that building AI now requires securing the infrastructure to power it.

The shift began in October 2024, when Google agreed with Kairos Power to access up to 500 megawatts of small modular reactor capacity by 2035. In August 2025 it moved from vision to execution, signing a power purchase agreement with Kairos and the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Starting in 2030, 50 megawatts of nuclear power will flow to data centers in Tennessee and Alabama, the first U.S. utility contract tied to a next-generation reactor.

Google’s nuclear push is less about climate pledges and more about control. By locking in decades of firm power, it is protecting the expansion of its AI infrastructure from the risks of grid stress and price swings. The company is positioning itself not as a passive buyer of electricity but as an architect of the energy systems that will define the next era of computing.

In the world of AI, scale depends on power. Google has made clear it intends to own that foundation.

😂 Meme of the day

Thanks for reading,

Eddie

Join the AI Creative Club (you’ll find me there). It’s not only for artists and filmmakers…it’s for anyone who recognizes this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn as much as you can about AI to multiply your impact...to become superhuman. Remember, creativity is just intelligence having fun. This club is for ultra curious people, and if you’ve made it this far…you’re pretty damn curious and probably the smartest one in your circle of friends. It would be my honor to have you in there.

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