OpenAI's Revenue to Triple this Year, Reach $12.7 bn

OpenAI is on track to more than triple its revenue this year, reaching $12.7 billion as demand for its AI products surges, Bloomberg reported. The company, which generated $3.7 billion in revenue last year, is reportedly projecting further growth to $29.4 billion in 2025.

Despite skyrocketing revenue, OpenAI faces significant operational costs, including expenses for high-performance AI chips, data centers, and top-tier talent acquisition.

Bloomberg also reported that OpenAI is close to securing a $40 billion funding round led by SoftBank Group Corp., with investors Magnetar Capital, Coatue Management, Founders Fund, and Altimeter Capital Management in discussions to participate.

Alongside its financial growth, OpenAI is enhancing ChatGPT’s functionality. On Tuesday, the company introduced GPT-4o’s native image generation feature, enabling users to upload and edit images.

While OpenAI initially planned to roll it out to all ChatGPT users, by Wednesday, the feature was available only to Pro, Plus, and Teams subscribers. CEO Sam Altman later announced that the rollout to free users was delayed due to unexpectedly high demand.

Additionally, OpenAI is adopting Anthropic’s AI integration standard, MCP. Announcing the move on X, Altman stated, “People love MCP, and we are excited to add support across our products.”

The standard is now available in the Agents SDK, with future support planned for the ChatGPT desktop app and responses API.

MCP, introduced by Anthropic, is an open-source standard that enables AI assistants like Claude to interact with external tools, data sources, and applications. It allows large language models (LLMs) to access and process external data in a structured and standardized way.

Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger welcomed OpenAI’s adoption of MCP, calling it a “thriving open standard” with thousands of integrations. Altman also hinted at sharing more details on OpenAI’s implementation of MCP in the coming months.

Last month, ChatGPT crossed an impressive 400 million weekly active users (WAU), with over 2 million business users leveraging the tool for work, according to OpenAI’s Chief Operating Officer, Brad Lightcap.

In a recent post on X, Lightcap shared the company’s excitement about serving 5% of the world every week, highlighting the rapid growth of ChatGPT’s user base.