This is how the perfect storm was forged that brought advertising to ChatGPT

The upcoming rollout of advertising on ChatGPT is actually OpenAI’s last-ditch effort to continue driving growth.

About a week ago, OpenAI announced that advertising would soon be available on its flagship platform: ChatGPT. The news, which many had anticipated for some time, was met with widespread enthusiasm among advertisers, who find the idea of ​​placing ads on this trendy platform extremely appealing.

At first glance, and without looking any further, the arrival of advertising on ChatGPT only strengthens the position of OpenAI, a company whose growth has skyrocketed over the past three years. OpenAI’s recurring revenue surpassed $20 billion in 2025, ten times more than two years ago. Furthermore, ChatGPT already boasts 800 million active users. And among the paying clients of the famous AI chatbot are no fewer than one million companies.

Such metrics are undoubtedly extraordinary, and if revenue were the only truly relevant metric, Sam Altman would probably be the most successful CEO since the invention of advertising. However, when it comes down to it, profits, not so much revenue, are the most important metric when assessing the success (or, conversely, the failure) of a company. And in this particular area, the numbers are anything but favorable for OpenAI, emphasizes marketing expert Mark Ritson in an article for Horizont.

Deutsche Bank estimates, not surprisingly, that between 2024 and 2029, OpenAI will accumulate a negative cash flow of $137 billion. «No startup has ever operated with losses of this magnitude,» the financial institution warned last October.

Giant Expenses and Meager Revenues: The Combination Explaining the Arrival of Advertising at ChatGPT

To achieve the coveted profitability (which ChatGPT’s parent company is currently light years away from), OpenAI would have to multiply its revenues tenfold. These revenues currently barely cover the exorbitant expenses of a company that has committed to investing a staggering $1.3 trillion in data centers over the next few years. The situation takes on an even bleaker aspect when we consider that OpenAI has cash reserves of a mere $16 billion.

It’s obvious that, to fill their coffers to overflowing, companies first have to lose money hand over fist. Amazon, for example, lost billions of dollars for five consecutive years before becoming profitable. It took Tesla even longer to become profitable, accumulating losses of $8.5 billion over a nine-year period.

However, OpenAI is not Amazon, and its economy operates on entirely different parameters than those of the company founded by Jeff Bezos. After all, the volume of investment OpenAI needs to continue its rapid growth is absolutely titanic in comparison. And compared to OpenAI’s losses, Amazon’s losses seem almost like a rounding error.

Proof that OpenAI’s financial situation is clearly alarming is that last year Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company of American billionaire Warren Buffett, acquired a $4 billion stake in Alphabet, Google’s parent company. At a time when AI is at its peak, Warren Buffett’s company has not invested in OpenAI or Anthropic, but rather in a company with a proven track record of solvency that likely has what the startup led by Sam Altman lacks: a clear path to profitability.

Unlike OpenAI, Google has its own cloud storage infrastructure and manufactures its own chips. In 2025, the Mountain View company undertook an investment of $85 billion, an absolutely colossal figure that can, however, be easily covered thanks to the multiple stable revenue streams that Google has at its disposal. Google’s advertising business alone generated more than $190 billion in 2025.

Its investment in advertising won’t prevent OpenAI from drowning in a sea of ​​expenses.

Google also has the advantage of having successfully integrated AI into its renowned search engine without cannibalizing its thriving advertising business. This perhaps explains why Warren Buffett (a man known for his keen business sense) decided to invest his money in Google and not OpenAI.

Although OpenAI is expected to generate revenues of $29 billion in 2026, the company will need this figure to skyrocket to $190 billion by 2030 not only to achieve profitability but also to survive. And this goal seems impossible at first glance.

For now, expansion is not an option for OpenAI, which already has a global presence. Furthermore, in a business like AI, adding new users not only doesn’t reduce expenses, but actually increases them. With more users, computing costs ultimately increase.

To boost profitability, OpenAI could raise its current fees for paying users, but this option is hardly plausible, as charging ChatGPT users more than $20 a month to access the popular AI chatbot would likely reduce the conversion rate (which, to make matters worse, is currently only 5%).

What OpenAI can do is diversify its business, but this doesn’t appear to be the definitive solution either. The company has already launched the Sora video generation tool and the Atlas browser, and is currently working with Jony Ive, Apple’s former chief designer, on OpenAI’s first hardware device. While diversification is obviously an option for growth, launching new products also implies more investment in research and development, more computing power, and more capital—precisely what OpenAI lacks.

The upcoming launch of advertising on ChatGPT is actually OpenAI’s last-ditch effort to fuel its growth. Thanks to advertising, OpenAI could generate an additional $24 billion by 2030, a figure that, while stratospheric, will unfortunately not be enough to prevent the company from drowning in a sea of ​​expenses, Ritson concludes.

Source: www.marketingdirecto.com