‘Sora’ reportedly cost OpenAI $1 million per day
A new report claims that OpenAI has discontinued its video app Sora due to high compute costs, declining engagement, and changing priorities.
Last week, it was revealed that OpenAI’s AI video-generating app Sora was officially shutting down, and a new report from The Wall Street Journal points to several specific factors that likely led to the decision. The most important of which is that it reportedly costs OpenAI $1 million per day to run the app.
OpenAI’s help page for Sora states that both the web experience and app versions will be discontinued starting April 26, 2026, and the API will also be discontinued on September 24, 2026.
“If you want to keep your Sora content, we recommend exporting your data before the Sora app is discontinued. You can download individual images and videos from your Library before the Sora web and app experiences are discontinued. See below for more details on how to export your data.
We are still determining whether we can make Sora content available for export for a limited time after we discontinue the Sora web and app experiences as described above. If a final export window is offered, we’ll notify you by email before it begins. We recommend you export your Sora content before the discontinuation date.”
– OpenAI Help documentation for Sora
A recent exclusive report from The Wall Street Journal claims that the number of active users had dropped from around one million to less than 500,000 by the time the shutdown was announced. Rising operating costs, coupled with declining user engagement, clearly show why the company’s operations were not possible even with funding from companies like Disney.
The report states that Disney learned of the closure just an hour before the announcement. Since then, Disney has likely been in talks with several other AI companies.
According to Business Insider, OpenAI plans to move towards robotics focused on solving “real-world” problems.
“We’ve decided to discontinue Sora in the consumer app and API. As we focus and compute demand grows, the Sora research team continues to focus on world simulation research to advance robotics that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks.”
– An OpenAI Spokesperson
Credits:
Image courtesy of OpenAI.
