OpenAI: We’re generating $2 billion a month
Raises record $122 billion in funding
OpenAI says it is generating $2 billion in revenues every month.
The generative AI pioneer revealed the earnings as it raised $122 billion in funding from investors including Amazon, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and SoftBank.
The round valued OpenAI at $852 billion.
It is the largest private funding round in Silicon Valley history.
The OpenAI funding round saw Amazon invest $50 billion – a reported $35 billion contingent on an IPO or it hitting “AGI” by the end of 2028. (“A put option disguised as a capital commitment” as one commentator put it.)
The funding round comes weeks after the Wall Street Journal reported that the company plans to pivot hard to coding and enterprise workflows.
In March OpenAI axed its Sora video generator (which researchers at Forrester described to The Stack as a “resource black hole”) and rolled out ads in ChatGPT – a move CEO Sam Altman once described as a “last resort.”
Ads hit $100 million in ARR in under six weeks it added.
Widely reported internal projections suggest its total losses will hit $143 billion by 2029. Its investors clearly like the data they are seeing, regardless.
Analysts at Morgan Stanely in March commented: “AI-related investment now looks more like industrial build-out than speculative tech spending.”
(The bank's research team estimates ~$2.9 trillion in global data center construction spending alone through 2028 “fueled by sustained demand for compute that vastly exceeds supply. This feeds directly into industrial output, power investment and services spend... with an expected contribution of ~25% of U.S. GDP growth this year,” they wrote.)
“Our own chip”
OpenAI revealed plans to build its own AI accelerator hardware with Broadcom in October 2025 – and used its funding announcement to emphasise plans for ongoing hardware and partner diversification.
Whilst NVIDIA remains central to its hardware and software stack, OpenAI is “building a broader infrastructure portfolio across multiple cloud partners, multiple chip platforms, and deeper co-design across the stack,” it said.
The company wrote on March 31 that this spans cloud with “Microsoft, Oracle, AWS, CoreWeave, and Google Cloud; silicon through NVIDIA, AMD, AWS Trainium, Cerebras, and our own chip in partnership with Broadcom; and data centers through partnerships with Oracle, SBE, and SoftBank.”
New OpenAI user numbers revealed
OpenAI broke out some fresh usage and revenue numbers when announcing the new funding round in a company blog this week.
On the consumer side, ChatGPT has over 900 million weekly active users. Search usage has nearly tripled in a year, and a new advertising pilot reached more than $100 million in ARR in under six weeks, OpenAI said.
Enterprise now accounts for “more than 40% of our revenue” with OpenAI’s APIs processing more than 15 billion tokens per minute, it added.
"The capital being deployed today is helping build the infrastructure layer for intelligence itself. Over time, that value will flow back into the economy, to companies, to communities, and increasingly to individuals," it claimed.