Less than a month after rolling out ads, ChatGPT has already enlisted Criteo as its first advertising technology partner and could add The Trade Desk next.
OpenAI announced ad trials in February for ChatGPT Free and Go users, with a minimum brand commitment of $200,000. On March 2, Criteo was confirmed as the first ad tech partner, connecting its 17,000 advertisers and $4 billion+ in annual media spend directly into the ChatGPT ad pilot. Days later, The Information reported OpenAI has held early talks with The Trade Desk about a similar arrangement.
These moves reinforce that OpenAI is prioritizing partnerships as a fast route to scalable revenue and risk mitigation, key factors for short-term investor confidence, even though building an in-house ads platform must be inevitable.
The IPO Clock Is Ticking
Building a programmatic advertising business from the ground up is a long-term investment. For current and prospective investors, OpenAI’s immediate focus is on accelerating revenue to validate advertising as a robust revenue stream.
OpenAI is reportedly in informal talks with banks about a potential IPO, aiming to file by the end of the year. Its most recent funding round valued the company at $840 billion pre-IPO. Some sources estimate that if OpenAI moves forward with an IPO, it could seek a valuation of up to $1 trillion, making it potentially the largest IPO in U.S. history. (Saudi Aramco holds the global record at $1.7 trillion.)
OpenAI brought in $13.1 billion in revenue in 2025. Yet its own internal projections project $14 billion in losses in 2026, and others expect cumulative losses of $115 billion through 2029, with the company achieving profitability sometime in the 2030s. These losses come on the heels of OpenAI informing investors that it’s targeting ~$600 billion in total compute spend by 2030.
All this is to say that OpenAI faces intense pressure to earn revenue now, especially as Anthropic prepares for its own IPO, which could divert investor interest away from OpenAI. Adding to the competitive pressure, ChatGPT’s share of AI chatbot site visits has dropped from 86% a year ago to 64% as of January, indicating that competition from Google Gemini is closing the gap.
If OpenAI's competitive edge weakens and it fails to deliver meaningful, diversified revenue, its IPO attractiveness to investors may be compromised. Fast-tracking ad revenue and demonstrating scalable advertiser demand will be crucial for supporting OpenAI’s valuation story.
OpenAI Has the Audience. It Doesn't Have the Pipes.
Criteo spent over two decades building its recommendation models and its direct retailer relationships. The Trade Desk spent 15 years wiring itself into every major agency holding company and building the bidding infrastructure to handle the open internet at scale.
OpenAI has exactly zero of that.
What it has is 900+ million weekly active users and an intent signal that, per Criteo’s own data, converts 1.5x better than other referral channels. That’s the asset. The auction logic, the creative tooling, the measurement integrations, the agency relationships — all of that takes years to build credibility.
Partnering with Criteo and TTD lets OpenAI skip the build phase entirely and go straight to revenue. For a company burning cash like no tomorrow, the speed-to-market value of these relationships is massive.
The Criteo partnership makes sense for commerce — product discovery, retailer demand, and high-intent lower-funnel buyers. The Trade Desk is a different bet.
Why The Trade Desk?
First of all, why The Trade Desk? The company stands apart from major competitors like Google and Amazon, both of which have significant ambitions for LLMs and could pose direct threats to OpenAI in the AI ad space.
OpenAI appears to prefer partnering with an independent company over one with competing AI and advertising interests. TTD also brings 15 years of programmatic experience and established agency relationships to the partnership.
TTD would open the door for OpenAI to big agencies and brand advertisers. On the flip side, an OpenAI deal could be the shot in the arm that The Trade Desk needs as its stock price falters. TTD stock popped 15% on the news (and after Jeff Green announced he bought ~$150 million of TTD stock).
On its last earnings call, TTD broke down its inventory makeup that's increasingly reliant on video, an area dominated by a very finite number of CTV players (and shrinking after Paramount completes its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery).
50% video, which includes CTV
30% mobile
6% audio
“Display represented a low double-digit share”
Adding ChatGPT inventory to their platform extends that story into conversational AI, which is a genuinely new surface the company currently has zero exposure to.
This Playbook Has Been Run Before
Speaking of CTV, the partner-before-build approach is reminiscent of Netflix’s own strategy.
Netflix launched its ad-supported tier in November 2022 and immediately partnered with Microsoft to run its ad technology and sales operations. Microsoft had just acquired Xandr and was positioning it as a neutral third-party stack. Netflix didn't want to build the plumbing from scratch or hand the keys to potential competitors.
By 2025, Netflix had launched its own first-party ad tech platform, the Netflix Ads Suite, moving away from Microsoft's stack as its primary engine.
But the complexity of building a scaled advertising technology suite still loomed large, as Netflix still required outside help through a new partnership with Magnite. This demonstrates that even a tech behemoth like Netflix can’t cook up the infrastructure required to run a scaled ads business within three years.
Compared to OpenAI, Netflix has it easy. The company could leverage its partners' experience and hire seasoned professionals with years of experience in programmatic and video advertising. OpenAI has to create an entirely novel form of advertising from scratch.
Borrow First, Build Later — But the Partners Aren't Powerless
Who knows how long it will take to truly unlock the power of advertising within a conversational AI interface?
The people working on OpenAI’s advertising products must innovate as they go, while drawing on concepts from legacy forms of advertising. It will take time to figure out the best approach to monetize its 900 million users, create a sales pipeline, and develop a usable ad platform that integrates into existing advertiser workflows.
OpenAI is making the smart short-term call: borrow decades of programmatic infrastructure and experience to achieve short-term revenue goals and learn the business and technology behind them. Every partnership it forms is also an opportunity to understand what it'll eventually internalize.
While Criteo and The Trade Desk stand to gain a huge boost in business opportunity, they must grapple with the reality that this may be a temporary arrangement. But they could use this chance to develop the infrastructure required to monetize this new advertising surface (AI chat) elsewhere. Or maybe they could prove to be too valuable and woven too deeply to kick to the curb.
The smartest play for Criteo, TTD, or any other future OpenAI partners is to use this window to invent and build infrastructure so deeply embedded in how AI advertising works that it makes no sense to cut them out. Prove indispensable to the category, not just to OpenAI.
In any case, the question for the ad tech ecosystem isn't whether OpenAI will disintermediate partners, it's when.
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