Sam Altman’s ‘Last Resort’ Is Now a $100 Billion Bet for OpenAI

ChatGPT’s ad business has already crossed $100 million in weeks, with OpenAI projecting rapid growth as it scales toward billions of users.

BY LEILA SHERIDAN, NEWS WRITER

Illustration: Inc.; Photos: Adobe Stock

Earlier this year, OpenAI introduced ads into ChatGPT for some U.S. users, framing them as a way to help cover the steep costs of scaling AI. Now, new forecasts reveal just how profitable that move could be.

The AI giant expects to generate $2.5 billion in advertising revenue this year, with projections climbing as high as $100 billion annually by 2030, according to Axios, which cited internal presentations to investors.

OpenAI told investors it could bring in $11 billion in ad revenue by 2027, $25 billion in 2028, and $53 billion by 2029, figures that depend on the company reaching roughly 2.75 billion weekly users by the end of the decade, the report added.

That kind of growth would put OpenAI on a path to compete, at least in part, with the companies that currently dominate digital advertising. Google generated nearly $295 billion in ad revenue in 2025, while Meta reported about $196 billion, according to Reuters.

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The rollout is already moving quickly. Late last month, an OpenAI spokesperson said ChatGPT’s pilot ads in the U.S. had crossed $100 million in annualized revenue within six weeks of launch, Reuters reported. At the time, the company had expanded to more than 600 advertisers. For now, ads appear primarily for users on ChatGPT’s free tier and lower-cost Go plan, while paid subscribers are largely shielded from them. 

For OpenAI, the move marks a shift from how the company once positioned itself. As recently as May 2024, CEO Sam Altman described advertising as something he was hesitant to rely on. “Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me,” he said during an event at Harvard University, according to Business Insider. “I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model.”

Now, that “last resort” is becoming a central part of the company’s financial future.

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