OpenAI Kills Its Video Star to Save the Enterprise

In less than 15 months, Sora went from being one of OpenAI’s most talked-about consumer experiments to its most visible retreat.

On March 24, 2026, OpenAI announced it was shutting down Sora. The company offered no formal reason. But the signals were already clear with falling usage, unsustainable costs, and a shift in strategy that now places enterprise AI above consumer experimentation.

Sora’s trajectory was steep and short-lived. The app peaked in November 2025 with 3.3 million downloads across app stores, according to data from mobile intelligence firm Appfigures accessed by Wired. By February 2026, downloads had dropped to 1.1 million. Lifetime revenue from in-app purchases reached an estimated $2.1 million, a modest amount for a product that demanded massive computational resources.

At its peak, Sora’s infrastructure costs were staggering. Reports from Forbes that the app was burning an estimated $15 million per day in inference costs. Bill Peebles, who leads the Sora team at OpenAI, had already acknowledged the strain last year, writing that "the economics are completely unsustainable.”