Happy new year! After a short hiatus, The Prompt is back!

OpenAI’s goal for 2026 is focusing on the “practical adoption” of artificial intelligence, Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar wrote in a blog post over the weekend. In other words, getting the chatbot into more hands and ensuring people get the most out of it. Doing so will also help scale the business, creating the cash to spend on more compute to power further research breakthroughs and better products, Friar wrote. “Adoption drives revenue, and revenue funds the next wave of innovation. The cycle compounds.”

OpenAI ended 2025 with back-to-back massive infrastructure deals with the likes of Oracle, AMD and Broadcom that tallied up to $1.4 trillion of committed spend on compute over the next eight years— much, much larger than its revenue of $20 billion in 2025. Defending the company’s spending on compute, Friar added that OpenAI’s revenue has grown at the same rate as compute consumption: both tripled year over year.

OpenAI already charges different tiers of subscriptions for individual and enterprise users and its API platform business helps other developers build on top of its models. And most recently, it finally launched ads, revenue from which could amount to about $25 billion annually by 2030, according to some analysts— which could help cover the exorbitant costs of training and running AI........

© Forbes