OpenAI’s Advertising Business Hits $1 Billion Annualized Revenue Run Rate

OpenAI’s advertising business has reached $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate, the company said Monday, suggesting it is likely to fall well short of the $2.4 billion in ad revenue it had projected for 2026.

The ChatGPT creator launched ad sales in the chatbot in February, as a way to generate money from the hundreds of millions of people who use ChatGPT without pay. Earlier this year, OpenAI bet ads would become the largest driver of its revenue by the end of the decade. Lately, however, OpenAI has focused heavily on building a business selling to enterprises.

In a blog post on Monday, OpenAI said advertising was “one pillar of OpenAI’s diversified business model, alongside consumer subscriptions, enterprise offerings and usage-based APIs,” the term by which developers can plug into OpenAI’s AI models.