On January 16, 2026, OpenAI announced that it would introduce advertisements to the free version of ChatGPT and the Go subscription. In November 2025, CEO Sam Altman stated that he predicted the company's annual recurring revenue (ARR) for 2025 to be $20 billion. The user base has reached 800 million weekly active users (WAU), approximately 190 million daily active users (DAU), 35 million paid subscriptions, and one million enterprise customers. In July 2025, the company achieved $1 billion in monthly revenue for the first time, doubling from $50 million in January of the same year. Meanwhile, spending on compute infrastructure in 2025 is reported to amount to between $8 billion and $12 billion. In March, OpenAI completed a $40 billion funding round at a valuation of $260 billion, marking the largest round in history for a private tech company.
Source: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy (HN 584pt, 535 comments) (HN Search (backfill))