OpenAI’s $102 billion ad revenue target for 2030 faces a 90% haircut in new forecast

OpenAI has told outsiders that advertising alone could bring in $102 billion by 2030, making up 36% of its total revenue that year. A new analysis from Emarketer points in the opposite direction. The firm said the total addressable market for chatbot advertising may top out at just $5.4 billion, far below the scale implied by OpenAI’s internal projections. Emarketer also estimated that by 2026, the combined advertising revenue from OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon may still come in below $1 billion, while OpenAI has projected that it alone could reach $2.5 billion in AI ad revenue by the end of that year. The gap is the basis for the 90% shortfall cited in the report. AdWeek described the path to OpenAI’s forecast as requiring three separate breakthroughs at once: advertisers moving budgets away from search and social, OpenAI beating entrenched ad sellers such as Google and Meta, and the AI ad market jumping from a six-figure business in 2026 to a 12-digit market by 2030. The report also noted that the broader AI industry has already committed more than $1.6 trillion to data centers, chips, and power contracts.