OpenAI is b building the ad tech stack it’s currently borrowing

None of which is stopping OpenAI from leaning on Criteo to bring advertisers into ChatGPT in the meantime, or reportedly holding talks with The Trade Desk to do the same at scale. For now, these moves could solve a real problem: OpenAI has no advertiser relationships, no measurement history and no agency integrations. Criteo and The Trade Desk have all three. But companies don’t build out an internal ads org – let alone pay up to $385,000 to do it – if they’re planning to rely on outside vendors forever. Those are the compensation bands of a company building something it intends to own, not rent. 

“If OpenAI wants to serve ads to 910 million users and make money sooner than later, buying rather than building adtech is definitely their smartest play,” said eMarketer’s principal analyst Nate Elliott,

Smarter still, he continued, would be to channel those efforts around three areas: a demand side tool which allows buyers to indicate which creative they want in what conversations, a decision layer that helps OpenAI decide which ads will be most profitable and a measurement tool that provides self-serve metrics and optimization, as well as integrates with third-party modeling platforms.

“OpenAI will chose to build their own ad stack because only that way they will be able to work with a platform that enables the “new kind of advertising” that they envision, based on conversations with customers rather than other targeting data,”  said  Karsten Weide, principal and chief analyst at W Media Research. “But it’s not an either/or. Developing an AdTech stack takes forever, as does hiring and training developers and sales people. But OpenAI desperately needs revenue, that’s why they will partner with one or more DSPs. They will split the revenue and buy time to market that way.”

It’s the same playbook Netflix and Walmart ran when they decided to get serious about advertising. Both leaned on outside ad tech to get up and running quickly (Netflix through Microsoft, Walmart through a patchwork of DSP partnerships) before systematically building their own infrastructure and pulling as much of the ad tech stack in-house as they could. The difference is OpenAI is signaling that intent from day one, which makes the more interesting question not whether it will happen but how quickly – and what that means for the companies currently helping it get there. 

The answer to that depends partly on how urgently OpenAI needs advertising to work. By the numbers, the answer is very. The company is expected to burn through roughly $15 billion in cash this year, up from $9 billion in 2025, and has roughly 910 million weekly users – around 95% of whom don’t pay. Subscriptions alone won’t close that gap. Advertising is the most direct way to monetize the rest. In other words, the clock on those vendor relationships may be running out faster than Criteo and The Trade Desk realize. 

For Criteo, the OpenAI deal arrives at a complicated moment. The company is staring down a $75 million revenue headwind in 2026 after two major retail media clients reduced their scope, and its stock was trading near 52-week lows last month, Being named OpenAI’s first at ad tech partner is the most compelling validation of its agentic commerce reposition its had. The catch: the better it performs inside ChatGPT, the stronger OpenAI’s case for building that capability itself. 

Similarly, a ChatGPT partnership would be a significant shot in the arm for The Trade Desk and the waning confidence investors have in it. The irony is that The Trade Desk’s entire value proposition rests on being the open alternative to the walled garden and helping OpenAI scale its ads business could accelerate the arrival of exactly the closed, proprietary platform it has spent a decade positioning itself against. 

“The long-term risk for Criteo and The Trade Desk is they can both benefit by being the first pipes into AI demand, but the platform that owns the user relationship, the intent signal and the answer surface usually ends up with the most leverage,” said Wayvia CEO Anthony Ferry.

Owning the stack also gives OpenAI more control over one of the industry’s most sensitive fault lines; privacy. People are more conscious than ever of the machinery that monetizes their attention, and are subsequently more aware of the leverage they have when they feel companies breach that trust. The fallout from OpenAI’s Pentagon deal, which drove a visible wave of users to Anthropic’s Claude, showed how quickly trust can move. The early appearance of ads in ChatGPT did the same. 

For a company whose ad strategy depends on leeping 910 million weekly average users inside its ecosystem, it’s the central tension its entire moentisation will have to navigate.

“They recognize the risk to consumer trust and, given their capital backstop – while they know they need to eventually turn a major profit on this unit – they are more likely to pull back if they feel it is going to hurt that,” said Precient AI’s vp of strategy Will Holtz.