OpenAI Touts Early Advertising Win After Buzzkill Cutbacks

At the end of a week of waving white flags, OpenAI declared a win: The fledgling ChatGPT advertising network reached $100 million in annualized revenue in just two months.

It’s an impressive zero-to-60 metric. Unfortunately for Sam Altman’s startup, the digital advertising race is dominated by Big Tech engines revving at cruising speeds north of supersonic (Google now clocks more than $80 billion in ad sales per quarter). It also does little to shore up a balance sheet that’s looking wobblier than a hallucination-prone chatbot.

Just Around the Corner

Sources told Bloomberg in February that OpenAI is now forecasting annual revenue of $280 billion by 2030. It generated $13.1 billion in 2025, sources told CNBC, and garnered sales at an annualized rate of $25 billion as of February, according to The Information. 

Investors are buying the ramp-up story. The company just secured a $120 billion funding round at a $730 billion pre-money valuation; an IPO remains in the mix as soon as this year. CNBC, meanwhile, reported the company has recently been telling investors that total compute spend will be around $600 billion through 2030, down from previous bold proclamations of around $1.4 trillion. OpenAI is trimming the fat:

• Earlier this month, executives shifted strategy, pulling back on “side quests” and doubling down on servicing enterprise and coding tool users. CFO Sarah Friar recently said about 60% of revenue comes from consumers and 40% from enterprise clients.
• Sora, the video-generating app estimated to cost around $15 million per day to operate, became the first sacrificial lamb. OpenAI shuttered the app last week.

Ad It All Up: It has also been forced to rethink its ChatGPT commerce experience after slow adoption and transaction issues. Meanwhile, Apple is set to break its exclusive relationship with ChatGPT and open Siri to integration with other AI models, even as OpenAI’s big bet on building an iPhone-killer of its own has been pushed to next year. “If they don’t have some serious breakthroughs from a product perspective in terms of adoption, they’re gonna run into some problems,” Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group, told The Daily Upside.