OpenAI is betting heavily on advertising, with internal projections showing the business could bring in $2.5 billion this year and grow steeply to $100 billion by 2030.
Details shared with investors, and reported by Axios, outline a strong growth path. The company expects ad revenue to reach $11 billion in 2027, then $25 billion in 2028, and $53 billion in 2029.
These figures depend on one key assumption where OpenAI believes its products could reach 2.75 billion weekly users by the end of the decade.
Early this year, OpenAI began testing ads in ChatGPT for some users in the United States. The test focused on people using the free tier and the lower-priced Go plan.
Within six weeks, the pilot crossed $100 million in annualised revenue. By March, more than 600 advertisers had signed up.
That early traction gives a clearer picture of where the company is heading. Ad is no longer an experiment but an indispensable part of how OpenAI plans to make more revenue, alongside subscriptions and enterprise deals.
The market is large but crowded. Alphabet reported $294.69 billion in advertising revenue in 2025, while Meta posted $196.18 billion.
OpenAI is trying to take a share of that ad market by using a different advantage, ultimately boosting revenue. In chat-based systems, users usually state exactly what they want, which could make adverts more precise.
Still, there are issues. Some analysts have warned that showing ads inside ChatGPT could affect how people trust the service but OpenAI says it has not seen that so far.
The company reports low dismissal rates and no drop in its trust metrics since the pilot began.
Not everyone is taking the same route. Competitor Anthropic has said its Claude chatbot will remain ad-free, drawing a line between the two approaches.
Meanwhile, advertising is expected to carry a large share of OpenAI’s revenue as it tries to keep up with the high cost of building and running its AI systems.
The company is also strengthening itself as a business that can scale in the same way as the largest internet platforms, with ads being a big part of that plan.
