OpenAI Pulls the Plug on Sora — $15M/Day Burn Rate and $2.1M Lifetime Revenue Sealed Its Fate

OpenAI quietly shut down Sora, its AI video generation product, on March 24, citing compute reallocation and a strategic pivot toward world simulation for robotics. The real numbers behind the decision paint a stark picture: Sora was consuming approximately $15 million per day in inference costs at peak usage, while generating just $2.1 million in total lifetime revenue from in-app purchases — a ratio that made the product commercially untenable. OpenAI said the underlying technology will be redirected into its robotics and physical AI simulation division, where generative video models are seen as critical for training robot behavior without requiring physical hardware. The shutdown marks a rare public retreat for OpenAI, which had positioned Sora as a major front in the competition with competitors like Google's Veo and Runway. OpenAI confirmed it will now focus video generation capacity on Sora's enterprise API partners while it rebuilds the product with cost-optimized inference infrastructure.