OpenAI announced annualized revenue topped $20 billion in 2025 as compute capacity scaled from 0.2 GW in 2023 to 0.6 GW in 2024 and about 1.9 GW in 2025, with revenue rising in parallel from $2 billion ARR in 2023 to $6 billion in 2024. The company argues ChatGPT has moved from experimentation to everyday use at home and at work, embedding into workflows across engineering, marketing, finance, and management.
OpenAI says this adoption has shaped a “native” monetization mix that includes consumer and workplace subscriptions, usage-based pricing, and APIs, with commerce and advertising increasingly fitting as users come to ChatGPT to make decisions. It also says it is diversifying compute providers to balance premium hardware for frontier training with lower-cost infrastructure for high-volume workloads, improving performance and lowering unit costs.
The company cited computing as the core constraint in scaling AI, and says managing it like a portfolio helps reduce risk while improving planning and delivery. It argues that routing workloads across different hardware types and providers can boost latency and throughput while keeping costs low enough for routine, high-frequency usage—not just premium, specialized applications.
Looking ahead, OpenAI says the next phase is agents and workflow automation that run continuously, retain context over time, and take action across tools. For 2026, it says it will prioritize “practical adoption” in health, science, and enterprise, and expects monetization to broaden over time as AI becomes more embedded in domain-specific workflows, including potential licensing and outcome-based pricing.
