OpenAI is making more than $1 billion a month from something that has nothing to do with ChatGPT

• OpenAI has made more than $1 billion a month from something other than ChatGPT.
• That revenue comes "just from our API business," Sam Altman said.
• His comments come as OpenAI looks beyond model subscriptions to help cover soaring compute costs.

OpenAI has pulled in a billion-dollar month from something other than ChatGPT.

Sam Altman said in a post on X on Thursday that OpenAI added more than $1 billion in annual recurring revenue in the past month "just from our API business."

"People think of us mostly as ChatGPT, but the API team is doing amazing work!" the OpenAI CEO wrote.

OpenAI's API enables other companies and developers to embed its models into their own products, from internal productivity software to coding tools.

Many of Silicon Valley's high-profile startups rely on OpenAI's models as core infrastructure. Perplexity uses OpenAI's models to power parts of its AI search and answer engine. Harvey, one of the fastest-growing legal tech startups, is built on OpenAI's models to assist lawyers with research and drafting.

Altman's comments underscore how OpenAI's infrastructure business is emerging as a key growth engine, even as the company faces massive costs for computing power and data centers.

Those pressures have pushed OpenAI to look beyond consumer subscriptions.

Last week, the company said it is gearing up to test ads inside ChatGPT as it faces about $1.4 trillion in spending commitments over the coming years.

It's a notable shift for a company that once treated ads as taboo. Less than two years ago, Altman said advertising was a "last resort."

"Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me," Altman said during an event at Harvard University in May 2024. "I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model."

Since then, Altman has struck a more open tone. In June, he said on OpenAI's podcast that he wasn't "totally against" ads, though he stressed it would need to be approached carefully.

Earlier this week, OpenAI's chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, raised the idea of "licensing models" that would let the company share in downstream sales if a customer's product succeeds.

"Let's say in drug discovery, if we licensed our technology, you have a breakthrough. The drug takes off, and we get a licensed portion of all its sales," Friar said in an episode of "The OpenAI Podcast" published Monday.