ChatGPT reaches 900M weekly active users

OpenAI announced on Friday that its flagship AI chatbot, ChatGPT, has reached 900 million weekly active users, putting it on the cusp of the 1 billion user milestone. This represents a significant acceleration, adding 100 million new weekly users in just four months since reporting 800 million in October 2025. The company also revealed it now has 50 million paying subscribers, with January and February 2025 on track to be its largest months for new subscriber growth ever. OpenAI attributes the scaling usage to people leveraging ChatGPT for learning, writing, planning, and building, noting that increased scale directly improves response speed, reliability, safety, and performance.

The user growth announcement was paired with the revelation of a monumental $110 billion private funding round, one of the largest in history. The round was anchored by a $50 billion investment from Amazon, with Nvidia and SoftBank each contributing $30 billion, valuing OpenAI at $730 billion pre-money. The funding round remains open, with expectations for more investors to join. This massive capital infusion, coupled with the explosive user growth, solidifies OpenAI's dominant market position and provides unprecedented resources to scale its infrastructure, advance its AI models like GPT-4 and beyond, and fend off intensifying competition from rivals like Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude.