OpenAI's business customers now out-earn ChatGPT — two quarters earlier than the company told investors to expect
OpenAI's finance chief Sarah Friar told investors on 14 August that enterprise revenue has passed the consumer business built around ChatGPT. 'We entered the year at 60-40, but enterprise has accelerated much faster than expected and those lines have now crossed,' she said. The company put its annualised run rate at $40 billion as of July, up 20% month over month, with the count of business customers growing 32% in the same month. Advertising, which OpenAI began testing inside ChatGPT on 9 February, is approaching a $1 billion annual run rate — though the disclosure does not make clear which side of the split those ads were counted on. OpenAI had previously guided investors to expect the crossover at the end of 2026.
Why it mattersOpenAI became a household name through a consumer chatbot, and for three years the consumer product paid for the company. It no longer does. When the centre of gravity moves to enterprise contracts, what gets built changes with it: procurement, audit logs, data residency and uptime guarantees start outranking whatever makes the free tier delightful. It also lands while the company prepares to list, which makes the mix as interesting as the total — enterprise revenue is stickier and easier to forecast, and that is exactly what a prospectus wants to show.
Read in the app — free, in 9 languages
Related stories
Anthropic expects to raise as much as SpaceX did — the largest listing in history — and could file publicly this month2026-08-21Nvidia is paying $6 billion for the machine that builds a rival's models — and hiring 109 of the people who ran it
2026-08-21The doctors and lawyers who grade AI answers are now a half-billion-dollar business — and this one grew fivefold in eight months
2026-08-21Anthropic still leads on business AI spending. For the first time since May, the gap is closing rather than widening.
2026-08-21Alibaba's AI business grew at its fastest pace in five and a half years. Its profit fell about 75 percent.
2026-08-20