The company’s paying customer base is also exploding, with two million enterprise users, double the number from just six months ago.
Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap told CNBC that surging demand could help OpenAI secure a massive $40 billion funding round, with SoftBank expected to contribute up to $25 billion.
If completed, the investment could skyrocket OpenAI’s valuation to $340 billion. However, while more users mean more potential revenue, it means soaring operational costs.
The New York Times previously reported that OpenAI expects a $5 billion loss this year, despite projecting $3.7 billion in sales. Even ChatGPT Pro, the high-priced premium subscription tier, is reportedly a money-loser due to the hefty infrastructure costs required to power its advanced reasoning models and deep research mode.
“People hear about it through word of mouth. They see the utility of it. They see their friends using it. There’s an overall effect of people really wanting these tools, and seeing that these tools are really valuable,” he said.
Lightcap revealed that demand for OpenAI’s APIs has doubled in six months, while usage of its o3 model—designed for complex reasoning—has surged fivefold. This AI powerhouse recently shattered an industry benchmark for AI-driven mathematics, proving its might in high-level computations. However, developers currently only have access to a scaled-down version, o3-mini, which prioritises speed and cost efficiency over top-tier output quality.
Lightcap likened this usage to cloud services, which Amazon Web Services pioneered two decades ago. While the consumer business may grow faster since people can adopt it at will, enterprise is in the “process of building up,” he said.
“There’s a buying cycle there, and a learning process that goes into scaling an enterprise business,” Lightcap said. “AI is going to be like cloud services. It’s going to be something that you can’t run a business that ultimately is not really running on these very powerful models underneath the surface.”
Despite financial hurdles, OpenAI has its sights set on an ambitious future, aiming to hit one billion weekly users by year’s end. The company expects to triple its revenue to $11.6 billion in the same period, with a long-term goal of raking in over $100 billion by 2029—when it finally hopes to turn a profit. Whether OpenAI can balance explosive growth with sustainability remains to be seen, but for now, the AI juggernaut shows no signs of slowing down.
