Scoop: OpenAI projects $100 billion in ad revenue by 2030
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
OpenAI expects to generate $2.5 billion in ad revenue this year and $100 billion by 2030, according to a source familiar with recent presentations to investors.
Why it matters: It's the clearest sign yet that OpenAI sees advertising as a core part of its future business.
Driving the news: OpenAI's ad pilot generated $100 million in annual recurring revenue in under two months and the company says it's projecting steep growth.
- The company has told investors to expect the $2.5 billion in 2026 ad revenue to grow to $11 billion in 2027, $25 billion in 2028 and $53 billion by 2029, per the source.
- The projections assume OpenAI's products reach 2.75 billion weekly users by 2030 and capture a share of the global ad market dominated by Google, Meta, Amazon and TikTok.
Context: Chatbot ads could be unusually lucrative because users volunteer exactly what they want.
- Meta and Google have built effective ad businesses by both knowing and inferring what their users like, care about and want to buy.
- With chatbots, users often directly state their goals.
The big picture: OpenAI is trying to convince investors and potential backers of a future IPO — that it has multiple revenue streams that scale alongside the company's ever-increasing spending on compute.
Yes, but: The introduction of advertising, while a potentially lucrative way to offset its massive costs, risks upending one of the key selling points of AI chatbots — that they work for the users, not for the advertiser.
Advertising has been the primary revenue stream for the consumer internet, funding services such as email and social networking without directly charging users.
- Critics say that has created a system where tech companies are incentivized to keep people spending as much time as possible on their services.
Between the lines: OpenAI and rival Anthropic have diverged over the issue, with Anthropic using a Super Bowl commercial to declare that Claude will remain ad-free.
- OpenAI, for its part, has said that advertising will allow its products to reach more people and has laid out a series of principles designed to clearly separate any advertising and lay out the kind of data that will be shared with marketers.
