On 27 April, Monday, Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI didn’t achieved its revenues and new users target and added that the company’s cfo Sarah Friar shared her concerns with the senior management that ChatGPT’s developer might struggle to finance the substantial investments planned for data centres, causing a stir among investors.
Sarah Friar
The WSJ said that ChatGPT growth started to slowe down at the end of 2025 as OpenAI did not achieve the the internal target of one billion weekly active users.
The firm’s ceo Sam Altman and Friar said in an email to Reuters: “It’s ridiculous. We’re completely in agreement that we need to acquire as much computing power as possible and work hard together every day.”.
In March 2026, OpenAi secured a giga-round of 122 billion US Dollars for a post-money value of 852 billion and attracted the resources of Amazon (50 billion), NVIDIA, SoftBank (30 billion each), Microsoft, a16z, Sequoia, Blackstone, BlackRock, and several other investors (see here a previous post by BeBeez).
On that occasion, the company stated: “OpenAI has been the fastest technology platform to reach 10 million users and to hit 100 million and will soon reach one billion weekly active clients. Less than a year after the launch of ChatGPT, we reached 1 billion in revenue. By the end of 2024, we were generating 1 billion per quarter. Currently, we have a monthly turnover of 2 billion. At this stage, our growth is four times faster than that of the companies that defined the internet and mobile eras, including Alphabet and Meta.”
