OpenAI is making a high-stakes advertising bet. Will that help it beat Anthropic?

MW OpenAI is making a high-stakes advertising bet. Will that help it beat Anthropic?

By Christine Ji

OpenAI is doubling down on ads as a core pillar of its business, reportedly targeting $100 billion in advertising revenue by 2030

OpenAI is aiming to make ads a key business while rival Anthropic focuses on the enterprise AI market.

OpenAI looks to be getting serious about advertising as competition among top artificial-intelligence labs heats up.

The ChatGPT creator has set ambitious goals of generating $2.5 billion in ad revenue this year and $100 billion by 2030, according to an Axios report from Thursday.

According to the report, OpenAI expects a steep revenue ramp: Ad revenue is projected to hit $11 billion in 2027, $25 billion in 2028 and $53 billion in 2029. These figures are contingent on the platform scaling to 2.75 billion weekly active users by 2030 and taking market share from Google $(GOOGL)$ $(GOOG)$, Meta Platforms (META) and other large digital-ad businesses.

Representatives from OpenAI did not immediately respond to a MarketWatch request for comment.

Last month, the company shared that its ad-business pilot surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue less than two months after the launch.

As part of the company's initiative to grow revenue and stay abreast of competition, the Wall Street Journal reported last month that OpenAI is shelving "side quests" to focus on core enterprise and productivity tools. The company has discontinued its video generator Sora and scaled back its agentic shopping initiatives. All the while, OpenAI's coding product Codex and this new foray into ads have remained key pillars of the company's business.

OpenAI's reported revenue targets come after rival Anthropic shared new financial details earlier this week. On Monday, Anthropic revealed that its revenue run rate has exceeded $30 billion, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025. OpenAI recently shared that it generates $2 billion in revenue a month, and many investors have interpreted this as a sign that Anthropic has surpassed OpenAI in revenue generation.

Read: Anthropic appears to have overtaken OpenAI on this key financial metric

Ads could be a lucrative monetization avenue for OpenAI. Google's ad business brought in nearly $300 billion in revenue in 2025, comprising 73% of the company's total sales. In 2025, 98% of Meta's revenue came from ads.

According to a Bloomberg report from February, OpenAI is targeting $280 billion in total revenue for 2030. Ad revenue of $100 billion would come out to more than a third of that.

In a note earlier this week, Jefferies analyst Brent Thill pointed out that OpenAI has over 900 million weekly average users, with about 50 million of them being paying customers. "We view this as a massive go-forward monetization opportunity," Thill wrote.

"Given the size of the user base, there is no reason why OpenAI cannot monetize these users using either advertising or subscription and achieve the advertising forecast," Richard Windsor, founder of the research firm Radio Free Mobile, wrote in a Friday note.

With OpenAI and Anthropic gearing up for potential initial public offerings this year, they'll need to show investors proof of monetization. OpenAI seems to be taking a different approach than Anthropic, which released a Super Bowl commercial declaring "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude."

With OpenAI committing to spending $600 billion on compute by 2030, the company needs to demonstrate clear growth momentum to assuage concerns that it's overspending on AI. While OpenAI is forecasting a revenue leap, Windsor cautioned that data-center economics may hinder profitability.

"Assuming that the forecasts are met, this means that in the year 2030, OpenAI thinks it will be generating around $28 billion per [gigawatt]," Windsor wrote. However, Windsor pointed out that for the last three years, the industry has been consistently stuck at generating $10 billion in revenue per gigawatt of compute capacity.

"I remain very cautious about OpenAI and continue to think that it and Anthropic will offer very little to investors at IPO," Windsor wrote.

See more: Why Alphabet and Meta investors shouldn't sweat ChatGPT's ad launch - for now

-Christine Ji

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April 10, 2026 13:33 ET (17:33 GMT)

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