I don't think OpenAI has that option.
The business model was you could sell books over the internet at a much cheaper cost compared to Barnes and Noble or Borders because they weren't paying for physical locations and there was no sales tax on the transactions because it was on the internet.
A key difference from OpenAI is that Amazon was cash flow positive from very early on and before that first profitable quarter. They only needed one funding round Series A of $8 million instead of repeatedly trying to raise extra rounds of funding from new VC investors.
The Amazon startup already had enough free cash from operations to internally fund their warehouse expansions. The "Amazon had no profits" was an accounting side-effect because of re-investment. Anybody seriously studying Amazon's financial statements in the late 1990s would have paid more attention to their cash flow rather than "accounting profits".
On the other hand, OpenAI doesn't have the same positive cash flow situation as early Amazon. They are truly burning more money than they take in. They have to get billions from new investors to buy GPUs and pay salaries. ($40 billion raised in latest investment round.) They are cash flow negative. The cash flow from ChatGPT subscription fees is not enough to internally fund their growth.
ChatGPT was released in Nov 2022. They are expecting $12B in revenue this year[2].
[1] https://adainsights.com/blog/when-did-amazon-start-making-mo...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/26/openai-expects-revenue-will-...
Thank you for the correction. My memory was faulty and Jeff Bezos actually said, "we always had positive gross margins". Deep link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN1PyNwjHpc&t=36m11s
The positive gross margins allowed enough discretionary use of cash to take out loans and service that debt. I just looked at the 1998 10k filing and the page on "Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows" has "Net cash provided by (used in) operating activities" of positive $31 million compared to negative -$6 million in 1996.
To invest in OpenAI is to bet that they won't need to keep investing more in hardware than they bring in. To me that doesn't seem a sure thing, but it isn't obviously wrong either. They are growing revenue very quickly and already have significant cashflow, and it isn't clear to me that they'll need to sustain the CapEx forever.
Amazon out-priced everybody when it arrived, because it didn't charge any sales tax for years, until the laws had to be re-written to close the loophole. It didn't have the eye-watering sums poured into it that AI has had, nor did it have any significant competition internationally. Things couldn't be more different for OpenAI.