OpenAI appears to be growing quickly despite increasing competition.
The San Francisco-based tech company had 400 million weekly active users as of February, up 33% from 300 million in December, the company’s chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, told CNBC. These numbers have not been previously reported.
Lightcap pointed to the “natural progression” of ChatGPT as it becomes more useful and familiar to a broader group of people.
“People hear about it through word of mouth. They see the utility of it. They see their friends using it,” Lightcap said in an interview, adding that it takes time for individuals to find use cases that resonate. “There’s an overall effect of people really wanting these tools, and seeing that these tools are really valuable.”
OpenAI is seeing that spill over to its growing enterprise business. The company now has 2 million paying enterprise users, roughly doubling from September, said Lightcap, pointing out that often employees will use ChatGPT personally and suggest to their companies that they implement the tool.
“We get a lot of benefits, and a tail wind from the organic consumer adoption where people already have familiarity with the product,” he said. “There’s really healthy growth, on a different curve.”
Developer traffic has also doubled in the past six months, quintupling for the company’s “reasoning” model o3, according to Lightcap. Developers use OpenAI to integrate the technology into their own applications. OpenAI counts Uber, Morgan Stanley, Moderna and T-Mobile among some of its largest enterprise customers.
Lightcap likened this usage to cloud services, which Amazon Web Services pioneered two decades ago. While the consumer business may grow faster since people can adopt it at will, enterprise is in the “process of building up,” he said.
“There’s a buying cycle there, and a learning process that goes into scaling an enterprise business,” Lightcap said. “AI is going to be like cloud services. It’s going to be something that you can’t run a business that ultimately is not really running on these very powerful models underneath the surface.”
The DeepSeek effect
OpenAI’s growth comes amid new competition from Chinese competitor DeepSeek, which roiled tech markets in January as investors feared it would hamper future profitability of U.S. artificial intelligence companies and their dominance. Megacap tech companies were hit especially hard. Nvidia lost 17% on the Monday DeepSeek made waves, wiping off almost $600 billion in market value.
Later that week, OpenAI accused DeepSeek of improperly harvesting its models in a technique known as distillation. Lightcap said the new competition hasn’t changed the way OpenAI thinks about open source, their product road map or mega-spending plans.
“DeepSeek is a testament to how much AI is like entered the public consciousness in the mainstream — it would have been unfathomable two years ago,” he said. “It’s a moment that shows how powerful these models are and how much people really care.”
Besides DeepSeek’s emergence, OpenAI has also been dealing with a tense time on the legal front.
Billionaire Elon Musk, a company co-founder, has sued OpenAI for breach of contract as it attempts to convert into a for-profit. Microsoft has poured billions into the company while SoftBank is close to finalizing a $40 billion investment that could value the company at close to $300 billion, according to sources familiar with the deal.
Musk and a group of investors bid to buy the nonprofit’s assets for $97.4 billion earlier this month. In a letter to Musk’s attorney, OpenAI’s lawyer said the company’s board determined that Musk’s “much-publicized ‘bid’ is in fact not a bid at all.” OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor said in a statement that the company “is not for sale.”
“The numbers tell the story,” Lightcap said. “We try to be very transparent about where we stand on all of this. (Musk) is a competitor. He’s competing. It’s an unorthodox way of competing.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks next to SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son after U.S. President Donald Trump delivered remarks on AI infrastructure at the Roosevelt Room in the White House in Washington on Jan. 21, 2025.
Carlos Barria | Reuters
OpenAI said last week that it would restructure in a format that allows its non-profit entity to retain ultimate control, a plan that on Tuesday received the blessing of one of the U.S. artificial intelligence startup’s biggest backers — Japanese giant SoftBank.
The endorsement of SoftBank — the first time the company has publicly green lit the plan — is key because the Japanese firm’s $30 billion investment in OpenAI announced this year was contingent on a change in structure.
In March, OpenAI closed a $40 billion funding round, receiving $30 billion from SoftBank. But if OpenAI doesn’t restructure into a for-profit entity by Dec. 31, SoftBank has previously said it could reduce its portion of the financing to $20 billion.
OpenAI announced this month that it would not fully turn into a for-profit entity after pressure from civic leaders and former employees. Instead, the non-profit arm would retain control of the company, while the limited liability company, which handles all of the business operations, would turn into a public benefit corporation. That means this division will have the ability to generate profit, but will also focus on social good.
The AI startup was originally looking to remove the control of the non-profit, a plan that drew criticism from many in the tech space, including rival and initial OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk.
Since the non-profit would retain control, and the original restructure plan was ditched, it was unclear if OpenAI’s major investors were on board.
But SoftBank’s finance chief Yoshimitsu Goto said during an earnings press conference on Tuesday that “nothing has really changed.”
“I don’t think that’s the wrong direction … that’s something that we expected,” Goto said, according to a company translation of his comments in Japanese.
He reiterated that OpenAI needs to complete the restructure by the end of this year.
There could still be stumbling blocks along the way. Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s biggest investors, has not approved the restructure, according to a Bloomberg report earlier this month. The Financial Times on Sunday reported that OpenAI and Microsoft are rewriting the terms of their multibillion-dollar partnership. Microsoft is the key holdout to OpenAI’s restructure plan, the FT added.
SoftBank’s Goto did not mention any other companies, but acknowledged that OpenAI has many stakeholders.
“Our conversation is based on the assumption that the reorganization will take place. There are different staekholders however and some people may intervene in this project and this may not go as smooth as we hope,” Goto said.
“But that’s out of our control. We will wait and see what happens.”
Crypto.com logo displayed on a phone screen with representation of cryptocurrencies.
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Dubai’s Department of Finance announced a partnership with crypto platform Crypto.com that will allow government service fees to be paid with cryptocurrencies.
The memorandum of understanding between Dubai government officials and Mohammed Al Hakim, president of Crypto.com UAE, was signed Monday on the sidelines of the Dubai FinTech Summit.
Government officials said in a press release that the partnership will help achieve the “Dubai Cashless Strategy,” which seeks to solidify Dubai’s status as a leading digital city. The strategy aims to reach 90% cashless transactions across Dubai’s public and private sectors by 2026.
Once technical arrangements for the initiative are finalized, individuals and “businesses customers of government entities” will be able to pay service fees through digital wallets on Crypto.com.
“The platform will securely convert these payments into Emirati dirhams and transfer them to Dubai Finance accounts, ensuring a streamlined, secure, and innovative payment framework,” Dubai Finance added.
Crypto.com’s Al Hakim called the initiative a “truly global first programme.” However, the announcement did not clarify what types of digital currencies the department of finance would accept, or for which types of government fees covered by the agreement.
Crypto.com and Dubai Finance did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
Crypto.com first received a license for its Dubai entity to offer regulated virtual asset service activities in 2023. Last month, the company said Dubai’s virtual asset regulatory body had also issued a limited license to offer derivatives.
SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son delivers remarks next to U.S. President Donald Trump at an ‘Investing in America’ event in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 30, 2025.
Leah Millis | Reuters
Softbank‘s Vision Fund business on Tuesday posted a loss in the fiscal year ended March as it booked slowing gains at its massive tech investment arm.
SoftBank said it notched a gain on investment at its Vision Funds of 434.9 billion yen in the fiscal year, a 40% fall from the 724.3 billion yen booked in the previous year.
In its fiscal fourth quarter — the three months ended March — SoftBank’s Vision Funds segment recorded a 26.1 billion yen gain, helped by a rise in the value of TikTok owner ByteDance.
The Vision Fund segment overall logged a pretax loss of 115.02 billion yen ($777.7 mllion) versus a profit of 128.2 billion yen in the previous fiscal year.
For the latest fiscal year, SoftBank saw gains on its investments in Chinese ridehailing company Didi as well as South Korean e-commerce firm Coupang. However, the performance of its investment arm was hurt by a drop in value of companies including AutoStore.
The Vision Funds are a key focus for investors who are looking for signs of improvement at SoftBank’s huge investment arm, after it swung to a surprise loss in the company’s fiscal third quarter.
SoftBank’s investment division can be inconsistent, as it is driven by changes in public and private financial markets.
SoftBank’s stock is down about 17% this year as volatility in financial markets and concerns about the macroeconomic environment continues to weigh on the company.
SoftBank hits back at Stargate funding report
SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son has sought to position company as a key player in artificial intelligence through various investments and acquisitions. The firm owns the majority of semiconductor designer Arm and announced plans this year to acquire server chip designer Ampere Computing for $6.5 billion. Ampere’s semiconductors are designed to run AI applications.
One of SoftBank’s biggest AI bets has been on OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. SoftBank invested $30 billion in OpenAI as part of a broader $40 billion financing round in March that valued the startup at $300 billion.
Softbank is also involved in Stargate, a joint venture that was unveiled by U.S. President Donald Trump in January, calling for hundreds of billions of dollars of investment into AI infrastructure.
There are still questions about how SoftBank plans to finance these ventures and whether it will need to sell down some of its holdings in companies like Arm.
Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg had on Monday reported that dozens of financial players are reassessing investment in data centers due to growing economic volatility, and SoftBank has yet to come up with a financing template for Stargate.
Yoshimitsu Goto, chief finance officer at SoftBank, said during a Tuesday press conference that media reports of banks hesitating to fund SoftBank’s efforts are not true.
“We are very much making progress,” Goto said.
He added there are around 100 proposals being made for sites to build data centers as part of Stargate, with the first facilities likely to be in Texas.
SoftBank swings to profit
SoftBank posted its first annual profit in four years at 1.15 trillion yen.
While the Vision Fund was an overall drag on profit, it was a big gain in SoftBank’s older investments in Alibaba, T-Mobile and Deutsche Telekom, that helped drive its overall profit.
Arm and SoftBank’s telecommunications business also contributed positively to the group’s overall profitability.