Energy independence: America is now a major exporter of natural gas

3/30/24 7:00PM

Energy independence

‍While artificial intelligence dominates the headlines of business and tech newspapers around the country, America’s energy industry has been quietly thriving. Indeed, 3 weeks ago the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that the US had produced the equivalent of 12.9 million barrels of crude oil and condensate per day last year, 28% more than the world’s previous top producer, Russia, and 33% more than even the oil-rich Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

And, it’s not just oil.

Thanks to hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), a wave of previously inaccessible, or at least uneconomical, oil and gas reserves are now being extracted at record speed. Indeed, as recently as 2015, America’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) never left the country: now it’s a key component of one of the country’s most geopolitically important exports.

‍Uncomfortable truth: While America’s fossil fuel output is breaking records, sensors in the world’s oceans are also reading temperatures that we’ve never seen before, leaving researchers and scientists “astounded”.

Nate Becker

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OpenAI’s ARR reached over $20 billion in 2025, CFO says

Sam Altman’s $500 billion artificial intelligence behemoth hit a major financial milestone last year, according to a new blog post over the weekend from OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, as the company confirmed it had hit a more than $20 billion annual revenue run rate at the end of 2025.

Elsewhere in the blog post, Friar spent time addressing the company’s shifting goals, referencing plans to “close the distance between where intelligence is advancing and how individuals, companies, and countries actually adopt and use it.” As has become customary in the AI company press release genre, the CFO was also keen to tout the unending growth of the business, writing:

“Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) figures continue to produce all-time highs. This growth is driven by a flywheel across compute, frontier research, products, and monetization.”
“Compute grew 3X year over year or 9.5X from 2023 to 2025: 0.2 GW in 2023, 0.6 GW in 2024, and ~1.9 GW in 2025.”

And, perhaps most importantly for current backers and those keeping an eye on the private company before its rumored mega IPO:

“Revenue followed the same curve growing 3X year over year, or 10X from 2023 to 2025: $2B ARR in 2023, $6B in 2024, and $20B+ in 2025. This is never-before-seen growth at such scale.”

That latest figure has certainly set tongues in the tech world wagging, just as the company announced it would begin rolling out ads to free and ChatGPT Go users. It also puts the chatbot giant a fair way ahead of competitors like Anthropic, the company behind Claude.

OpenAI Anthropic ARR race — Sherwood News

A business that scales with the value of intelligence

“Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) figures continue to produce all-time highs. This growth is driven by a flywheel across compute, frontier research, products, and monetization.”
“Compute grew 3X year over year or 9.5X from 2023 to 2025: 0.2 GW in 2023, 0.6 GW in 2024, and ~1.9 GW in 2025.”