The stakes are huge for OpenAI’s burgeoning ads business
OpenAI desperately needs revenue, as AI’s ability to process incoming requests becomes more in demand, and more expensive. The company has already made $600 billion in commitments on infrastructure by 2030—a recalibration of an earlier figure that had those commits at $1.4 trillion.
But it’s unclear if ad revenue, even coupled with subscription revenue, will be enough to keep the company sustainable and solvent.
The AI firm predicts it will make $2.5 billion in ads revenue this year, and $100 billion by 2030, according to Axios. One big challenge OpenAI faces is that, unlike Google, Amazon, and Meta, the user data it needs to power ads requires more compute to produce making it more expensive, and it’s not certain how good and how scalable that data currently is.
OpenAI is also one of the few major AI firms currently building an ads business. Perplexity was the first major AI lab to welcome advertising, launching tests in late 2024; however, it has since abandoned plans to put ads in its AI search engine as it looks to build consumer trust. Claude maker Anthropic has pledged to remain ad-free, even throwing stones at OpenAI’s embrace of ads in its Super Bowl campaign this year.
Google, for its part, told some advertisers that it plans to introduce ads into Gemini, then said it has no plans, and then declined to rule it out.
