Updated Oct. 26, 2026, 6:43 a.m. ET: Adds Sacra’s estimate that OpenAI reached $50 billion in annualized revenue in September.
OpenAI’s business customers now bring in more money than ChatGPT’s consumers. “We entered the year at 60-40, but enterprise has accelerated much faster than expected and those lines have now crossed,” CFO Sarah Friar told investors on Friday, according to a person in the meeting quoted by CNBC. “The majority of our revenue is now enterprise.”
That’s ahead of schedule. Friar had told CNBC earlier this year that she expected the two businesses to reach parity by the end of 2026. CNBC also confirmed, after Bloomberg first reported it, that OpenAI’s annualized revenue run rate has reached $40 billion. Slides viewed by CNBC showed the run rate up 20% month over month in July, with business customers up 32%.
Cost per unit of intelligence
Friar described a shift in how companies buy AI. “Enterprise customers have moved from tokenmaxxing to focusing on cost per unit of intelligence,” she said, meaning companies no longer let employees run up big AI bills without results to show for it. She pointed to the newest model being “54% more efficient” on agentic coding tasks and to recent price cuts across OpenAI’s models.
Advertising is becoming a real line item. Friar said OpenAI “made great strides” there, and the person said ads are approaching a $1 billion run rate, about six months after OpenAI started testing ads in ChatGPT. Sacra puts the ads business at $1 billion in annualized revenue as of August.
A turbulent week
The meeting capped a rough stretch for OpenAI’s leadership. Revenue chief Denise Dresser, formerly Slack’s CEO, stepped down the day before, eight months into the job, and longtime executive Brad Lightcap said two days earlier that he was leaving to “start something new.” President Greg Brockman, who joined the meeting, thanked Dresser and said he was excited about her replacement, Dali Rajic, formerly operating chief at Wiz.
Investors asked about cheap open-source Chinese models. Brockman brushed off the threat and said there’s a misunderstanding about open source being cheaper. Executives wouldn’t discuss IPO timing, citing OpenAI’s confidential SEC filing, which Sacra says was made June 8.
OpenAI closed a $122 billion round at an $852 billion post-money valuation in March, Sacra notes, so the bar for those growth numbers is high. For investors, the crossover to enterprise is the encouraging part, since business contracts tend to be steadier than consumer subscriptions.
Growth has kept going since. Sacra estimates OpenAI reached $50 billion in annualized revenue in September, up from $20 billion at the end of 2025.
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