New milestone! ChatGPT's weekly active users exceed 900 million

OpenAI is making significant progress toward the global scale that most tech products dream of.

This AI giant announced on Friday that its chatbot ChatGPT has reached 900 million weekly active users and is aiming for the even more ambitious milestone of 1 billion weekly active users. The company also noted that it currently has over 50 million paid subscription users.

“Subscription user growth has accelerated significantly at the beginning of the year, and January and February are expected to be the months with the highest new subscription numbers in our history,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post.

The article pointed out, “People are using ChatGPT for learning, writing, planning, and creating. As usage scales up, product performance continues to improve, with users experiencing faster response times, higher reliability, stronger security, and more stable performance.”

The last time ChatGPT surpassed the 800 million weekly active user milestone was in October 2025. Just a year and a half ago, ChatGPT’s weekly active users were only about 200 million.

This explosive growth indicates that generative AI has shifted from a curiosity tool for a few to a daily tool for hundreds of millions worldwide.

The platform has become the first choice for many users seeking help with writing, learning new skills, researching products, planning projects, or even finding creative inspiration. This broad appeal creates a virtuous cycle: more users generate more data and usage patterns, leading to smarter models, which in turn attract more users. Few platforms can complete such a rapid virtuous cycle.

ChatGPT’s rapid growth also highlights its fast global expansion. Regions like India have become major interaction hubs, reflecting increased population size and access to AI tools. While not every user pays, its massive scale has made the platform a powerful distribution channel for developers, businesses, and creators to reach a global audience.

Of course, this growth comes with challenges. Operating such large-scale global AI services is costly—maintaining the infrastructure for response, memory, and security requires huge investments. Users’ expectations for low-cost or free near-instant answers also put heavy pressure on OpenAI’s operations and commercialization strategies. Balancing accessibility and sustainability will be a key challenge for OpenAI’s future development.

It’s worth noting that OpenAI shared these figures when announcing a new funding round valued at $110 billion on Friday. This round more than doubled the company’s previous funding round from a year ago, which set a record for private tech company funding.

According to OpenAI’s announcement, in this round, Amazon invested $50 billion, Nvidia invested $30 billion, and SoftBank invested $30 billion. This funding valued the company at $730 billion pre-money, a significant increase from the $500 billion valuation in a secondary financing round last October.

(Source: Cailian Press)