A report Sunday by The Information — details of which were first reported by Bloomberg News — says the artificial intelligence (AI) startup has upped its “compute margin,” an in-house gauge for the portion of revenue that remains after it accounts for the kind of costs associated with running AI models used by corporate and consumer customers who pay its fees.
By October, that margin was 70%, the report said, citing a source who had been briefed on the matter. That’s up from 52 percent in December 2024 and double the rate in January last year. (Written in files) The Information also reported that while OpenAI boasts better margins on compute than its rival, Anthropic, for paid customers, Anthropic outperforms it on server spending.
Even as OpenAI and its ChatGPT helped fuel the current AI boom, the company (which was last valued at $500 billion) never turned a profit — fueling fears of a bubble in the space. Earlier this month, sources said CEO Sam Altman sounded a “code red,” imploring the team to step up its efforts on ChatGPT as competition between Google and Anthropic heats up.
The report comes after a week in which the company’s fundraising plans were the subject of multiple news reports and speculation that Uber could be valued at $750 billion to $830 billion.
In the interim, consumers have now spent more than $3 billion on ChatGPT for mobile since it was first released approximately 31 months ago, according to Appfigures’ conclusions reported last week. This platform provides mobile analytics and intelligence.
The vast majority of that — $2.5 billion — was spent this year alone, an increase of 408 percent from last year, the report found. Appfigures also highlighted that the ChatGPT mobile app reached $3 billion in mobile consumer spending faster than TikTok and other large streaming apps.
Karen Webster wrote last week that nearly 900 million people ask ChatGPT questions weekly, generating 2.5 billion queries a day. That has happened over three years, whereas it took Google 13 years to reach that volume.
According to PYMNTS Intelligence data, more than half of the U.S. population relies on ChatGPT and other chatbots to support the different pillars of the connected economy — activities that inform how consumers “shop, pay, live, work, eat, stay well,, have fun, travel, communicate, bank, and more.”
Thirty million power users rely on their chatbot to deliver 25 or more of the 54 activities it represents across these connected-economy pillars. More than 80 percent of those users use AI for shopping discovery, daily planning, learning, and even health.
“In a mere handful of years — actually even less than that, more like just the last 12 months, they’ve rewired their entire digital footprint around these conversational interfaces,” Webster wrote.
