OpenAI is making one of the boldest bets in the global tech industry, projecting that at least 220 million of ChatGPT’s weekly users will eventually buy a subscription, according to The Information, which cited a person familiar with the company’s internal forecasts.
The projection assumes ChatGPT will reach about 2.6 billion weekly users by 2030. If that happens, roughly 8.5% of them—around 220 million people—would convert into paying subscribers. That places OpenAI’s subscription ambitions on the same scale as the world’s largest digital services, a group that includes global streaming platforms and top-tier enterprise software giants.
As of July, about 35 million people—roughly 5% of ChatGPT’s weekly active base—were paying for the “Plus’’ or “Pro’’ subscription tiers, priced at $20 and $200 per month. The gulf between that figure and the company’s 2030 target shows the size of the leap OpenAI expects as it rolls out more powerful models, business tools, and commercial-grade features.
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But even with the explosive rise in users, OpenAI’s finances remain tight. The company has attracted tens of billions of dollars in investment from backers, including Microsoft, pushing its private valuation to around $500 billion—a level rivals needed decades to reach. Yet the company is still running at a loss as it competes in a field where model training costs run into billions of dollars, and day-to-day operations require huge amounts of computing power.
The company’s annualized revenue run rate is expected to reach about $20 billion by year-end, according to sources who spoke to Reuters. But losses continue to grow at nearly the same pace. Earlier reporting from The Information said OpenAI generated around $4.3 billion in revenue during the first half of 2025—about 16% higher than it earned in all of 2024—while burning $2.5 billion over the same period. Much of that money went into research, training newer models, and maintaining the enormous infrastructure needed to keep ChatGPT running for hundreds of millions of users.
This financial structure has created a paradox for the world’s most famous AI startup: record-breaking valuation and influence, yet thin revenue and persistent losses.
That is why OpenAI is placing so much hope on subscriptions. The company is counting on paid users to eventually offset its massive operating costs and help it break even. The internal forecast of 220 million subscribers reflects that strategic push. A successful transition to a subscription-driven model would give OpenAI a predictable cash stream that could finally match its spending on GPUs, data centers, and model development.
The company is also trying to widen its revenue sources. It expects around 20% of future earnings to come from new products outside the traditional chatbot format. This week, OpenAI introduced a personal shopping assistant inside ChatGPT, a move that could open the door to advertising partnerships or commission-based retail revenue.
Even so, the company’s financial path remains steep. Training frontier models now costs billions of dollars per cycle, and competition from Google, Anthropic, Meta, and others is further driving up the price of the high-end chips needed to stay ahead.
Against this backdrop, OpenAI is now leaning into the idea that the global appetite for AI will keep rising—and that millions of users will eventually pay to take part in what the company views as the next major shift in personal computing.