OpenAI Killed Sora in Six Months. It Burned $15 Million a Day and Made Almost Nothing.

OpenAI’s Sora was supposed to change everything. When it launched in late 2025, it was the AI video tool that would let anyone create Hollywood-quality clips from a text prompt. Filmmakers panicked. Disney signed a billion-dollar deal. The future of video had arrived. Six months later, Sora is dead. The app shuts down on April 26, 2026, and the API follows in September. What happened between the hype and the obituary is one of the most expensive product failures in tech history, and possibly the best case study in why “cool demo” and “viable product” are very different things. The Numbers That Read Like Satire Let’s start with the financials, because they’re genuinely hard to believe. According to Forbes reporting, OpenAI was burning roughly $15 million per day on Sora inference costs at peak usage. Each 10-second video clip cost about $1.30 in compute to generate. The annual inference bill was on track to hit $5.4 billion. Against that, Sora’s total lifetime revenue was $2.1 million.