ChatGPT ads hit $1B run rate in 200 days

OpenAI said Monday that ChatGPT Ads has reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate less than 200 days after launch, and that advertisers can now buy ChatGPT ads directly through Ads Manager in India, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Tens of thousands of advertisers are already on the platform.

The company set an internal target of $2.5 billion in advertising revenue for the year. That sits inside a bigger number: OpenAI’s total revenue is tracking toward an annualized figure above $40 billion, roughly double where it stood at the end of 2025.

OpenAI is drawing a line around who sees ads at all. Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers stay ad-free. The company says ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives, and that advertisers never see users’ conversations.

Why this changes the calculus

A year ago, OpenAI’s business model was almost entirely subscriptions and API usage. A $1 billion run rate in under seven months means advertising is no longer a side bet, it is a real second leg of the revenue base, and one built on the free tier where the bulk of ChatGPT’s roughly 800 million weekly users sit. For builders shipping consumer AI products, that is a signal OpenAI intends to monetize scale the way any large consumer platform does, which changes what “free tier” competition looks like against a company that can now subsidize it with ad dollars. It also lands the same week the EU classified ChatGPT as a very large online platform under its toughest online-safety rules, a regime built for exactly this kind of ad-supported, mass-audience service, and the same week DeepSeek moved toward a $7.4 billion funding round rather than an ad business, a reminder that “how do you pay for a frontier model” still has more than one answer being tested in parallel right now.