OpenAI’s CFO provided an update on the company’s plans to monetize its services and spelled out its priorities for 2026.
Sarah Friar explained that the focus of the ChatGPT developer over the next 12 months was “practical adoption,” in blog post this week.
With the company investing massive amounts in infrastructure, prompting scrutiny of its finances, increased use of its products is a clear focus. Friar said that a key target for 2026 is “closing the gap between what AI now makes possible and how people, companies, and countries are using it day to day.”
She added, “The opportunity is large and immediate, especially in health, science, and enterprise, where better intelligence translates directly into better outcomes.”
Charting the growth of the company over the past three years, Friar revealed a correlation between the availability of compute and annualized revenue.
In 2023, available compute was 0.2 gigawatt, while it rose threefold in 2024 to 0.6 GW in 2024 and to around 1.9 GW in 2025.
Over the same period, the annual recurring revenue jumped from $2 billion in 2023 to $6 billion in the year that followed, and then to more than $20 billion over the past 12 months.
“This is never-before-seen growth at such scale,” Friar continued. “And we firmly believe that more compute in these periods would have led to faster customer adoption and monetization.”
While on the face of it that appears to be positive, the widely held concern is that this expansion of infrastructure comes at a monumental cost, and OpenAI’s spending commitments heavily outweigh its revenues, even allowing for the sharp upsurge.
In a Nov. 6 post on X, formerly Twitter, CEO Sam Altman said: “We are looking at commitments of about $1.4 trillion over the next 8 years. Obviously this requires continued revenue growth, and each doubling [of revenue] is a lot of work!”
Amid this landscape, OpenAI is looking at ways to raise capital, with the company already having committed to adverts on some tiers of ChatGPT despite Altman’s previous assertion that this would be a “last resort.”
More strategic commercialization is on the way, with Friar stating: “As intelligence moves into scientific research, drug discovery, energy systems, and financial modeling, new economic models will emerge. Licensing, IP-based agreements, and outcome-based pricing will share in the value created. That is how the internet evolved. Intelligence will follow the same path.”
She provided more detail during a company’s podcast on how licensing might work. “Let’s say in drug discovery, if we licensed our technology, you have a breakthrough,” she said. “The drug takes off, and we get a licensed portion of all its sales.”
While that scenario might still be some way off, Friar is extremely transparent about the company’s need to generate income. “Monetization should feel native to the experience. If it does not add value, it does not belong,” she said.
