OpenAI is telling investors it will reach 2.75B weekly active users (WAU) by 2030, which is the foundational assumption to reach a projected $100B in ad revenue. This announcement came out after this week’s recording, but it is too big of a headline in tech and AI not to discuss. While we’re bullish on ads and AI, this projection is delusional.

Here's why.

This growth curve has never been done. ChatGPT sits at ~900M WAU today. Hitting 2.75B means 3x'ing in four years. By comparison, Facebook took 13 years to reach 2B monthly users. They also had a powerful social network to expand growth and a social graph that powered a product to pull people back in daily. Google Search took roughly 20 years to become a daily habit for most internet users, and was helped along the way by being the default on Chrome, Android, and Safari. Google’s own AI, Gemini, with every distribution advantage on Earth sits at 750M MAU.

OpenAI is targeting nearly 4x Gemini's MAU, measured weekly, without owning a browser (does Atlas count?), an OS, a social graph, or a default search deal. In short, they don’t have a distribution moat.

And their category isn't even decided yet! Facebook and Google didn't have real competition when they were scaling. OpenAI is fighting multi-front war: Gemini (growing faster MoM than ChatGPT), Microsoft Copilot (embedded in Office and Windows), Claude (up 190% YoY), Meta AI (new model launch), Grok (power of Elon). Every one of them has either better distribution, faster growth, or both.

ChatGPT's own growth has already cooled from 4x YoY to ~6% QoQ heading into 2026. The early adopter wave is captured. The next 1.8 billion users need to be convinced why they should use OpenAI as a weekly habit.

Not all is lost however! OpenAI has a few levers to help achieve this lofty goal. And they need to do it before the category consolidates around someone else. There are really only four plays:

Why this matters for advertisers. The $100B ad revenue projection is downstream of the user number. If WAU lands at 1.5B instead of 2.75B (still a generational outcome), the realistic ad ceiling is probably $60-75 billion. Still massive, but a very different story than the one shared. The 2.75B number isn't a forecast, it’s a startup’s forcing function to reorient priorities towards ads and a telegraphing of exactly what OpenAI intends to do over the next 4 years.

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