Imagine launching a tool like ChatGPT merely as an experiment so people could see what happens when they gain access to advanced artificial intelligence. That is exactly what OpenAI did, and the results exceeded all expectations. People did not just experiment with it; they began using ChatGPT in their everyday lives. Students used it to help with homework late at night, parents planned trips and managed budgets, and writers overcame creative blocks. Gradually, its use expanded into more serious areas—people sought explanations for health symptoms, prepared for doctor’s appointments, or worked through difficult decisions. When they were tired, stressed, or lost, ChatGPT helped them think more clearly.
This trend quickly spread to the workplace as well. At first, it was small things: improving a proposal before a meeting, checking a spreadsheet, or rewriting an email to a customer so it sounded right. Soon, it became part of standard workflows. Engineers solved coding problems faster, marketers created campaigns with better insights, finance teams modeled scenarios with greater accuracy, and managers prepared more effectively for difficult conversations.
ChatGPT evolved from a tool for satisfying curiosity into essential infrastructure that helps people create more, make decisions faster, and work at a higher level. OpenAI defines itself as a company focused on technology research and deployment. Its goal is to shorten the distance between advances in intelligence and how people, businesses, and countries actually use it.
The Principle Driving Growth
OpenAI follows a simple principle: its business model should grow alongside the value that intelligence delivers. When people wanted greater capabilities and reliability, consumer subscriptions followed. As artificial intelligence entered teams and workflows, workplace subscriptions and usage-based pricing emerged so that costs matched the actual work performed. OpenAI also built a platform where developers and businesses integrate intelligence through APIs (application programming interfaces), with spending increasing directly in line with the results achieved.
Recently, OpenAI extended this principle to commerce as well. People do not come to ChatGPT only with questions, but also to decide what to do next—what to buy, where to travel, or which option to choose. Helping them move from exploration to action creates value for both users and partners. Advertising works similarly: when people are close to making a decision, relevant offers have real value as long as they are clearly labeled and useful. Everything must feel natural within the experience—if it does not add value, it does not belong there.
Both weekly active users (WAU) and daily active users (DAU) are at all-time highs. This growth powers a cycle connecting computing power, advanced research, products, and monetization. Investment in computing enables cutting-edge research and major model improvements. More powerful models unlock better products and broader adoption of the OpenAI platform. Adoption increases revenue, which funds the next wave of computing and innovation. This cycle is accelerating.
Numbers That Speak for Themselves
Over the past three years, OpenAI’s ability to serve customers—as measured by revenue—has directly tracked the computing power available. Computing capacity increased threefold annually, growing by a total of 9.5 times from 2023 to 2025: 0.2 GW in 2023, 0.6 GW in 2024, and approximately 1.9 GW in 2025. Revenue followed the same curve, increasing threefold annually and tenfold overall: CZK 45 billion in annual recurring revenue in 2023, CZK 135 billion in 2024, and more than CZK 450 billion in 2025. Growth of this kind at this scale is unprecedented. OpenAI believes that more computing power would lead to even faster adoption and monetization.
Computing power is the scarcest resource in artificial intelligence. Three years ago, OpenAI relied on a single supplier. Today, it works with a range of providers, giving it resilience and planning certainty. It can finance and deploy capacity with confidence in a market where access to computing determines who can grow.
This approach transforms computing from a constraint into a managed portfolio. OpenAI trains advanced models on premium hardware where capabilities matter most. It handles high-volume workloads on lower-cost infrastructure where efficiency is the priority. Latency is falling, throughput is rising, and intelligence is being delivered at a cost of just a few hellers per million tokens (units of processing). This makes artificial intelligence accessible for routine workflows, not just elite use cases.
The Future: From Tools to Agents
Built on this computing layer is a product platform spanning text, images, voice, code, and APIs. Individuals and organizations use it to think, create, and operate more effectively. The next phase brings agents and workflow automation that run continuously, retain context over time, and take action through tools. For individuals, this means artificial intelligence that manages projects, coordinates plans, and carries out tasks. For organizations, it becomes an operating layer for knowledge work.
As these systems shift from novelty to habit, usage becomes deeper and more enduring. This predictability strengthens the platform’s economics and supports long-term investment.
The business model closes the loop. OpenAI began with subscriptions. Today, it has a multi-tiered system with subscriptions for consumers and teams, a free tier supported by advertising and commerce to drive broad adoption, plus usage-based API pricing for production workloads. The future will bring new models, such as licensing, intellectual property-based agreements, or outcome-based pricing that shares the value created. This is how the internet evolved, and intelligence will follow the same path.
This system requires discipline. Securing cutting-edge computing capacity means making commitments years in advance, and growth is not always even. Sometimes capacity outpaces usage; at other times, the reverse is true. OpenAI manages this with an asset-light balance sheet, partnerships instead of ownership, and flexible contracts across suppliers and hardware types. Capital is committed incrementally based on actual demand signals. This makes it possible to invest ahead of growth without unnecessarily tying up the future.
Focus for 2026
For 2026, the priority is practical adoption. The goal is to narrow the gap between what artificial intelligence makes possible and how people, businesses, and countries use it every day. The opportunity is enormous, especially in healthcare, science, and business, where better intelligence delivers better outcomes.
Infrastructure expands what OpenAI can deliver. Innovation expands what intelligence can do. Adoption expands who can use it. Revenue funds the next leap. This is how intelligence becomes a foundation of the global economy.
Additional source: theinformation.com
