OpenAI projects $70B annualized revenue by end of 2026, up from $50B in September

Bloomberg reports OpenAI told stakeholders it expects to exit 2026 at a $70B annualized revenue rate, compared with about $50B at the end of September. That would mean adding roughly $20B of run-rate in three months — an extraordinary pace even by OpenAI's standards.

The growth engines are visible across this week's news. GPT-6.1 Sol is being positioned as the core of a reorganized ChatGPT work platform; Amazon Bedrock now offers an Ultrafast mode for Sol and reasoning summaries for OpenAI models; enterprise case studies show Sophos automating 52% of managed detection cases with Daybreak and Asana cutting its browser agent costs 76x. On the consumer side, the company is piloting sponsored ads in ChatGPT image generation for free users.

Competitively, the figure keeps OpenAI ahead of rivals on revenue scale while compute costs remain the central question — the sources do not discuss profitability. Hardware suppliers are feeling the demand: Samsung just guided for a record $80.1B quarterly profit on AI memory.

Caveats: annualized run-rate is a forward-looking projection, not booked revenue, and a single strong month can inflate it. The figure also arrived the same day as reports of OpenAI firing three safety researchers, a juxtaposition critics were quick to note.