ChatGPT News 2026: 1B Users, New Chip & IPO Delay

OpenAI spent the first half of 2026 doing three things at once: scaling ChatGPT past a billion users, building the infrastructure to make that scale affordable, and preparing the paperwork for what could be the largest tech IPO since Meta’s. All three are now colliding. ChatGPT ads are live in seven countries. OpenAI’s first custom chip just taped out. And the IPO that was supposedly weeks away is quietly sliding into 2027.

Along the way, OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion valuation, watched Anthropic overtake that mark in a single quarter, and got asked by the US government to slow-walk its next flagship model over security concerns.

Here’s where things actually stand.

ChatGPT Passes 1 Billion Users, By Two Different Measures

OpenAI told Cannes Lions attendees on June 22, 2026, that ChatGPT has surpassed 900 million weekly active users, roughly double the figure from February 2025. Separately, Sensor Tower data reported by Reuters put the ChatGPT app itself past 1 billion monthly active users in June 2026, the fastest app in history to reach that scale on its own terms.

Growth timeline:

February 2025: 400 million weekly active users
July 2025: 700 million weekly active users
December 2025: 800 million+ weekly active users
February 2026: 900 million weekly active users, alongside 50 million paying subscribers and 9 million+ paying business seats
June 2026: ChatGPT app crosses 1 billion monthly active users (Sensor Tower/Reuters)

But market share tells a different story than raw growth. ChatGPT’s web traffic share has fallen sharply even as absolute usage climbs, from around 87% in January 2025 to under 57% by March 2026, according to Similarweb data. Google’s Gemini has been the biggest beneficiary, growing from roughly 5.7% to over 25% of web traffic share in the same period. ChatGPT is still the largest single platform by a wide margin. It’s just no longer the only one people default to.

Revenue reality check: Audited figures reviewed by the Financial Times show OpenAI generated $13.07 billion in revenue during 2025, more than tripling from $3.7 billion the year before, against a reported $21 billion net loss for the year. Annualized revenue run rate hit roughly $25 billion by February 2026 and has been estimated closer to $28-30 billion by May.

GPT-5.6: A Model Launch the US Government Slowed Down

OpenAI’s next flagship model, GPT-5.6, has had an unusual rollout. Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki confirmed the model in June, and a preview system card was published June 26. But the Office of the National Cyber Director and the Office of Science and Technology Policy reportedly asked OpenAI to phase the release due to security concerns, and Sam Altman has told employees GPT-5.6 access is being granted per-customer rather than opened widely.

Why it matters: This is part of a broader pattern of the US government inserting itself directly into frontier model release timing, something that also touched Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 releases earlier this year. Frontier AI access is increasingly being treated as a national security lever, not just a product decision.

What’s confirmed about GPT-5.6:

Notable gains in UI generation and agentic coding, reportedly competitive with or ahead of rival coding-focused models
OpenAI has been shipping new models roughly every seven weeks through 2026
The Wall Street Journal reported OpenAI is preparing significant API price cuts alongside the launch, a move read as a direct response to Anthropic’s pricing on its own new Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models

Jalapeño: OpenAI Builds Its First Chip

On June 24, 2026, OpenAI and Broadcom unveiled Jalapeño, OpenAI’s first custom-designed AI chip, built specifically for LLM inference rather than adapted from general-purpose accelerators.

What it is:

A “blank-slate” inference chip co-developed with Broadcom (silicon implementation, networking) and Celestica (board and rack systems)
Went from design to tape-out in about nine months, roughly half the usual 1.5-2 year ASIC development cycle, partly by using OpenAI’s own models to accelerate chip design work
Engineering samples are already running workloads in the lab, including GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark, at production target frequency and power
Initial deployment targeted for late 2026, scaling through 2027 and “really going full tilt” in the first half of 2028, according to Broadcom CEO Hock Tan

Why it matters: Every major AI lab with the balance sheet to do it is now designing its own silicon, Google has TPUs, Amazon has Trainium, Microsoft has Maia, Meta has MTIA. Jalapeño is OpenAI’s answer, aimed squarely at cutting the cost of serving ChatGPT, Codex, and API traffic rather than training new models. It also gives OpenAI’s IPO pitch a concrete answer to “how do you get to profitability”: cheaper inference at the scale ChatGPT now operates at.

The chip sits inside a much larger hardware web. In February 2026, OpenAI closed a $110 billion-plus funding round that included a $30 billion direct investment from Nvidia (tied to 10 gigawatts of Vera Rubin compute) and a $50 billion investment from Amazon (tied to roughly 2 gigawatts of AWS Trainium capacity over eight years). OpenAI also has agreements with AMD for Instinct MI450 GPUs. Nvidia remains central to training workloads even as Jalapeño targets inference.

ChatGPT Ads: OpenAI Calls Itself “an Advertising Business”

The biggest shift in OpenAI’s business model this year has nothing to do with model quality. At its first-ever Cannes Lions appearance on June 22, 2026, Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser told the room OpenAI is “clearly in the advertising business now,” a sharp reversal from Sam Altman calling ads “a last resort” in 2024.

What’s live:

ChatGPT ads launched in testing on February 10, 2026, starting with free-tier and Go-plan ($8/month) users in the US
Now live in seven markets (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea), with Brazil and Mexico next
The only ad format is a “chat card,” a sponsored box with title, description, image, and link, shown below the model’s organic answer
Paid Plus ($20/month) and Pro ($200/month) tiers remain permanently ad-free
A self-serve Ads Manager opened May 5, 2026, with no minimum spend, supporting both CPM and CPC bidding

Early numbers:

The pilot crossed $100 million in annualized revenue within about ten weeks, with under 600 advertisers at that point
Over 2,000 brands are now advertising via Criteo alone as of June 2026
Initial CPMs started around $60 and fell to roughly $25 within ten weeks as the ad pool scaled, with many advertisers shifting to cost-per-click bidding
OpenAI says roughly 20% of ChatGPT queries carry direct commercial intent, with travel, retail, health, beauty, and financial services as the strongest early categories
Ad close-out (dismissal) rates reportedly fell 50% since February, which OpenAI points to as evidence of improving ad relevance

The projections are steep: OpenAI has told advertisers to expect $2.4-2.5 billion in ad revenue for 2026, rising to $11 billion by 2027, and $100 billion by 2030. Hitting that 2030 number would require capturing roughly a tenth of global digital ad spend and would put OpenAI’s ad business at around half of Meta’s current annual ad revenue, on a product that’s barely five months old.

Why it matters for marketers: For the first time, there’s a credible “third gatekeeper” alongside Google and Meta for intent-driven advertising. But the measurement and attribution infrastructure both incumbents spent a decade building doesn’t exist yet for ChatGPT. OpenAI has moved fast on partnerships (LiveRamp, Criteo, Adobe, StackAdapt) to close that gap.

The IPO: $1 Trillion or Bust, Possibly Until 2027

OpenAI confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC on June 8, 2026, a week after Anthropic did the same. For a moment it looked like both companies were racing toward late-2026 listings, following SpaceX’s public debut on June 12.

Then the timeline slipped. The New York Times reported June 26 that OpenAI is leaning toward pushing its IPO into 2027 rather than list below its $1 trillion valuation target. Advisers reportedly gave Sam Altman two options: list sooner at a lower valuation, or wait until 2027 to hold out for $1 trillion. Altman called cutting the target a “nonstarter.”

Why the hesitation:

CFO Sarah Friar has pushed for a 2027 timeline, citing roughly $600 billion in future infrastructure spending commitments through 2030 and the difficulty of meeting public-company reporting standards on a compressed schedule
SpaceX’s volatile post-IPO trading has reportedly made OpenAI’s advisers more cautious about retail investor appetite for richly valued tech listings
Amazon’s $35 billion investment commitment only fully unlocks once OpenAI goes public or reaches AGI, which puts some financial pressure against delaying too long
OpenAI’s own confidential filing included language stating timing is undecided and “it may be a while,” which some read as the company keeping optionality rather than being forced to delay

Where the valuation stands: OpenAI’s last private mark is $852 billion, set when its $122 billion round closed in March 2026 with anchor investments from Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank. Anthropic’s $65 billion Series H in late May pushed its own valuation to $965 billion, overtaking OpenAI in private markets for the first time. Prediction markets have reacted accordingly: as of late June, odds of an OpenAI IPO by the end of 2026 sat around 24%.

Competition: A Three-Way Race, Not a Solo Lead

Google (Gemini):

Gemini app grew from roughly 400 million to over 900 million monthly active users between May 2025 and Google I/O in May 2026
AI Mode inside Search now claims over 1 billion monthly users on its own
Web traffic share has climbed past 25%, more than tripling in a year, the fastest-growing major AI platform by that measure

Anthropic (Claude):

Overtook OpenAI’s private valuation in May 2026 with a $65 billion Series H at a $965 billion post-money valuation
Run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion in May 2026, up from $14 billion at its February round, and the company projects it will turn its first operating profit in Q2 2026
Filed its own confidential S-1 on June 1, 2026, a week ahead of OpenAI
Released Fable 5 and Mythos 5 in June 2026, though both were briefly suspended to comply with US export controls before access was restored July 1

Meta AI:

Still cites 1 billion monthly active users, a figure it hasn’t refreshed since May 2025 even as ChatGPT and Gemini both report newer, larger numbers
Shipped its own flagship model, Muse Spark, in April 2026, and separately entered the cloud infrastructure business (Meta Compute) on July 1

Where OpenAI still leads:

Raw scale, largest single AI platform by weekly and monthly users
Revenue diversity, now running consumer subscriptions, enterprise seats, API access, and a fast-scaling ads business simultaneously
Infrastructure ambition, the only lab besides the hyperscalers themselves now designing its own inference silicon

Where OpenAI is under real pressure:

Market share erosion, losing web traffic share to Gemini faster than its absolute user growth is adding new ground
Valuation gap, Anthropic now holds a higher private valuation, a genuine reversal after years of OpenAI being the default leader
Regulatory friction, government-mandated phased rollout of GPT-5.6 signals frontier model access is no longer purely a company decision
Burn rate, a reported $21 billion net loss in 2025 against $600 billion in future infrastructure commitments keeps the “path to profitability” question open

The Bottom Line

OpenAI heads into the second half of 2026 bigger than ever and more exposed than ever, at the same time. ChatGPT has genuinely become a mass-market product, past a billion users by more than one measure, embedded in how hundreds of millions of people research, shop, and work. The ad business, four months old, is already generating real revenue and forcing marketers to think about a third major ad platform.

Results so far:

1 billion+ monthly active app users (Sensor Tower/Reuters), 900 million+ weekly actives (OpenAI)
$13 billion in 2025 revenue, tripling year over year, with run rate estimated near $28-30 billion by mid-2026
ChatGPT ads live in seven countries, on pace for $2.4-2.5 billion in 2026 revenue
OpenAI’s first custom chip, Jalapeño, already running lab workloads ahead of a late-2026 deployment

The risks:

A reported $21 billion net loss in 2025 and $600 billion in infrastructure spending commitments through 2030
Web traffic market share sliding even as absolute usage grows, with Gemini and Claude both gaining faster in percentage terms
The IPO, once expected by late 2026, now more likely pushed into 2027 as Altman holds out for a $1 trillion valuation
Government-imposed limits on GPT-5.6’s rollout, a new kind of constraint frontier labs haven’t had to plan around before

OpenAI built the product that started this entire race. Whether it can convert a billion users and a trillion-dollar ambition into a business that actually turns a profit, on its own timeline rather than the market’s or Washington’s, is the story that will define the rest of 2026.