MW OpenAI is now bringing in $2 billion a month - and 3 more highlights from its latest update
By William Gavin
More funds run by Cathie Wood's Ark will have positions in the ChatGPT creator
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly issued a "Code Red" warning to staff in December.
OpenAI said Tuesday that it is now generating $2 billion in revenue every month, as it fights to keep its lead in the competitive artificial-intelligence market.
The company, which sparked the AI boom when it launched the ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, is now worth $852 billion after closing its most recent round of fundraising. Partners and investors including SoftBank (JP:9984), Amazon.com (AMZN), Nvidia (NVDA) and Microsoft $(MSFT)$ put $122 billion into the company, OpenAI said Tuesday.
"OpenAI is becoming the core infrastructure for AI, making it possible for people around the world and businesses, big and small, to just build things," the company said in a blog post. "Together, consumer adoption, enterprise deployment, developer usage and compute form a reinforcing flywheel that is translating capability into economic impact."
The company delivered numerous other updates as well. Here are the biggest highlights.
OpenAI is growing at 'mission scale'
OpenAI claims that it will "soon" be the fastest technology platform to reach 1 billion weekly active users, adding that it was already the fastest to reach the 100 million milestone. ChatGPT currently has more than 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million subscribers, according to the company.
And users' search usage has nearly tripled over about a year, according to the release, while OpenAI's application programming interface now processes 15 billion tokens per minute. A pilot program monetizing free ChatGPT usage with ads - which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once called a "last resort" - has generated more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue in less than six weeks.
Codex, a coding agent, now has more than 2 million weekly users, with usage up 70% month over month, OpenAI said. Business customers, a demographic that rival Anthropic has focused on attracting, now account for more than 40% of OpenAI's revenue.
To put OpenAI's $2 billion monthly revenue disclosure into perspective, the company was making some $1 billion every three months by the end of 2024, OpenAI said.
However, rapid growth doesn't last forever. Last December, Altman reportedly issued a "Code Red" warning to staff and predicted that slowing subscriptions, rising competition and high investment costs were a threat to OpenAI's future. The company, like other AI labs, is reportedly burning through cash fast.
In a first for the company, OpenAI's fundraising round was opened through bank channels to individual investors, who together contributed more than $3 billion. Several venture-capital firms also participated. In addition to the fundraising, OpenAI said Tuesday it had expanded its existing revolving credit facility to about $4.7 billion.
"This is commercial scale, and it is mission scale," OpenAI said of its growth. " This funding gives us the resources to continue to lead at the scale this moment demands."
Sharing the AI era's 'upside economics'
OpenAI also said it would make its shares available to exchange-traded funds managed by ARK Investment Management, which participated in the funding round. The move, OpenAI said, will give more people the opportunity to "share in the upside economics" of the AI era.
ARK's Cathie Wood, one of the most bullish names in tech, said Tuesday that the move will help with the "democratization" of venture capital. The firm's ARK Innovation ARKK, ARK Next Generation Internet ARKW and ARK Blockchain and Fintech Innovation ARKF ETFs will collectively have a roughly 3% stake in OpenAI, Wood said. The ARK Venture Fund has held OpenAI shares since April 2024.
ARK isn't the only firm attempting to make OpenAI more accessible to a wider audience ahead of a potential initial public offering, but investors should be mindful of the risks.
The Fundrise Innovation Fund $(VCX)$ debuted on the New York Stock Exchange on March 19, promising to give investors access to buzzy pre-IPO stocks like Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX. It quickly rose 1,840% to an intraday peak of $575 per share on March 25.
Then, things took a turn for the worse and investors paying a premium decided to pull out. The fund's shares were trading at less than $130 per share when the market closed on Tuesday.
Read: A buzzy fund offering access to pre-IPO AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI is plummeting
An AI 'superapp'
OpenAI said it was planning to build what it called a "unified AI superapp," that can understand intentions, take action and operate across workflows.
The app would combine ChatGPT, the coding agent Codex, browsing and "broader agentic capabilities," the company said, which would allow AI systems to work autonomously to carry out tasks. OpenAI added that a single product surface would allow it to move more quickly and coherently.
That's a change from last year, when OpenAI launched several standalone products that didn't always hit the mark. Last week, OpenAI scrapped its Sora AI video generator, which was losing the company about $1 million every day, the Wall Street Journal reported.
OpenAI currently has a free standalone mobile app for ChatGPT. Meanwhile, xAI, led by Altman rival Elon Musk, plans to turn the social-media platform X into what Musk has called the "everything app." Musk's Grok chatbot is available as both a tool on X and as a standalone service.
Altman in early 2025 asked former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to informally consult a team inside OpenAI working on making a social-media project similar to X, according to the Journal.
-William Gavin
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March 31, 2026 18:16 ET (22:16 GMT)
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