OpenAI is in the middle of a large funding round that would value the company at around $500 billion. That figure has made the firm one of the most closely watched names in technology, and demand from investors is intense. At Goldman Sachs’ technology conference in San Francisco this week, chief financial officer Sarah Friar spoke to a packed audience eager to hear how the business is performing.
Consumer focus dominates
Friar explained[1] that most of OpenAI’s revenue comes from individual users. Roughly 70 percent of the company’s activity is tied to consumers, with the remaining 30 percent linked to enterprise customers. ChatGPT now draws about 700 million weekly users, while developers building with OpenAI’s tools number around 4 million. Paid adoption continues to climb as well, with about 5 million business seats sold.
Revenue growth and infrastructure costs
OpenAI expects revenue of about $13 billion this year. That figure is roughly four times higher than in 2024. Supporting that growth requires heavy investment in computing resources, which reached about $2.6 billion. Much of that spending is ongoing, reflecting the scale of demand for AI services.
Changing use of models
The rollout of GPT-5 has shifted how customers use OpenAI’s systems. A new feature that helps users pick the right model has led to more tasks requiring reasoning. These workloads once made up about 2 percent of activity. Today they account for about 7 percent overall, and about half of enterprise use.
Lowering costs per task
Efficiency gains are another trend. Processing with GPT-4 once cost about $33 per token. With newer, lighter models such as GPT-5 nano, that cost has dropped to just 9 cents. The decline highlights how quickly the company has been able to cut inference expenses.
Expanding share in search
OpenAI is also taking a larger role in online search. The company estimates its share at about 12 percent, compared with around 6 percent at the start of 2025. Growth in conversational queries is expanding the market, and internal analysis suggests the company’s actual share could be higher than reported figures.
Shifting global usage
Another change comes from where users are based. Just a few months ago, 15 percent of ChatGPT activity was in the United States. That share has since dropped to about 10 percent, while international use now makes up 90 percent.
Running lean internally
OpenAI is applying its own products inside the company as well. In the finance department, employees are using coding agents and automation to carry out tasks. As a result, the team is smaller than at other firms of similar scale, running at about 18 percent of the typical headcount.
Notes: This post was edited/created using GenAI tools. Image: DIW-Aigen.
Read next: ChatGPT Usage Statistics: Numbers Behind Its Worldwide Growth and Reach (September, 2025)[2]
References
- ^ explained (finance.yahoo.com)
- ^ ChatGPT Usage Statistics: Numbers Behind Its Worldwide Growth and Reach (September, 2025) (www.digitalinformationworld.com)