OpenAI shuts down Sora after burning $15M a day
The video generator's web and app experiences ended April 26, with the API following in September, after lifetime revenue reached just $2.1 million.
EBElena Brandt
Published 6 Jul 2026, 23:09Updated 27 Jul 2026, 23:221 min read
- ▸Sora's web and app experiences were discontinued on April 26, 2026
- ▸The Sora API is scheduled to shut down on September 24, 2026
- ▸The product was reportedly burning $15 million a day in compute costs
- ▸Lifetime revenue totaled just $2.1 million against that spend
- ▸Chinese video models have since taken over the top of the leaderboard
An expensive lesson in unit economics
Few AI product shutdowns illustrate the gap between compute cost and monetization as starkly as Sora's: a daily burn rate that dwarfed its entire lifetime revenue within weeks, in a category where rivals were already pricing per-second generation aggressively.
Source: Bloomberg
