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OpenAI reaches $12 billion annualized revenue as user base and enterprise deals grow


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The company behind ChatGPT has more than doubled its annualized revenue in under eight months, fueled by strong demand from both individual users and enterprise clients.






Revenue has more than doubled since the end of 2024.

OpenAI has achieved an annualized revenue run-rate of $12 billion, according to sources familiar with the company’s internal financials. This figure marks a sharp acceleration from the $5.5 billion run-rate reported at the end of 2024. In practical terms, it means OpenAI is now generating approximately $1 billion per month from its various lines of business, including ChatGPT subscriptions, API licenses, and enterprise contracts.


This explosive growth positions OpenAI not only as a major force in the generative AI space but also as one of the most revenue-generating private tech companies in the world today. The increase is attributed to both the scale of adoption and the diversification of the business model over the past year.



ChatGPT continues to expand, now with 700 million weekly users.

One of the clearest drivers of OpenAI’s revenue growth is the expanding user base of ChatGPT, the company’s flagship AI assistant. As of July 2025, OpenAI is reporting approximately 700 million weekly active users, up from around 500 million earlier in the year. This user base includes both free users and paying subscribers.


The growth has been supported by a strategic expansion of ChatGPT's functionality and product offerings:

  • For consumers, the company rolled out new capabilities such as Study Mode, Advanced Voice, native image generation, and mobile/desktop integration, encouraging user retention and premium upgrades.

  • For professionals and enterprises, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Team and ChatGPT Enterprise, which offer customized models, secure environments, extended context lengths, and multi-seat collaboration features. Some enterprise clients are reportedly signing contracts valued at over $10 million annually to integrate GPT-4o into their operations.

This dual focus—on mass-market appeal and high-value contracts—has made ChatGPT not only a popular app, but also a serious business tool for thousands of companies globally.



Costs are rising fast, but new funding is in motion.

Despite the massive revenue gains, OpenAI remains a cash-intensive operation. The company is projected to spend approximately $8 billion in 2025—a figure that includes cloud computing costs, infrastructure development, research, and global deployment efforts. That represents a $1 billion increase over previous spending forecasts, as demand for compute power continues to scale with usage.


To support this level of burn, OpenAI is actively raising capital through a multi-stage funding round that aims to bring in $30 billion. According to insider reports, over $7 billion has already been secured. Key participants include:

  • Sequoia Capital, investing hundreds of millions of dollars;

  • Tiger Global, known for backing fast-growing tech;

  • SoftBank, which has now reached $32 billion in total investment in OpenAI, becoming one of its largest strategic backers.

The company’s valuation is now estimated between $260 billion and $300 billion, making it one of the most valuable private tech firms in the world. This valuation reflects not just the current revenue stream, but expectations of dominant market share in the future AI economy.



The shift to enterprise is accelerating OpenAI’s monetization strategy.

While ChatGPT’s free and Plus versions continue to bring in millions of individual users, OpenAI’s long-term monetization strategy is increasingly centered on enterprise adoption. This includes:

  • Large contracts for custom GPT-4o deployments, often tailored to specific industries such as finance, legal, or healthcare;

  • Wider rollout of Team and Enterprise plans, with collaboration tools and guaranteed uptime;

  • API licensing at scale, allowing developers and platforms to integrate GPT functionality into their own products.



This enterprise-focused shift gives OpenAI a higher revenue-per-user figure than most consumer apps, and aligns with its broader vision of becoming the AI infrastructure layer for other businesses and institutions.


The broader context: scale, competition, and the cost of staying ahead.

OpenAI's $12 billion run-rate is not just a revenue milestone—it signals a new phase of industrial-scale AI deployment. But maintaining this lead comes with mounting challenges:

  • The company must continue to build and access massive computing infrastructure, much of it hosted on Microsoft Azure and, increasingly, Oracle Cloud.

  • It needs to convert more of its user base into paying customers, especially among professionals and organizations that have so far remained in free tiers.

  • It depends on strategic funding from global capital sources (including sovereign wealth funds and global venture capital) to support expansion, especially as operating costs increase faster than immediate revenue.



Meanwhile, competitors like Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta are also ramping up their enterprise efforts. Notably, Anthropic has reached a $4 billion run-rate and is in talks to raise at a $170 billion valuation—a sign that the enterprise AI race is heating up.


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