OpenAI’s ‘flatlining’ subs in Europe: The AI boom’s poster child may be struggling to recruit new subscribers, Deutsche Bank warns

Jim EdwardsBy Jim EdwardsExecutive Editor, Global News
Jim EdwardsExecutive Editor, Global News

Jim Edwards is the executive editor for global news at Fortune. He was previously the editor-in-chief of Business Insider's news division and the founding editor of Business Insider UK. His investigative journalism has changed the law in two U.S. federal districts and two states. The U.S. Supreme Court cited his work on the death penalty in the concurrence to Baze v. Rees, the ruling on whether lethal injection is cruel or unusual. He also won the Neal award for an investigation of bribes and kickbacks on Madison Avenue.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
Florian Gaertner—Photothek/Getty Images

User spending on ChatGPT has “stalled” and “the value of OpenAI subscriptions, which surged from a standing start in January 2023, has flatlined in the major European markets over the past four months,” according to new data published by Deutsche Bank.

OpenAI made a $500 billion commitment to buy 10 gigawatts of custom-designed chips from Broadcom yesterday, and has previously committed to spending $1 trillion with Nvidia, AMD, and Oracle. But “the poster child for the AI boom may be struggling to recruit new subscribers to pay for it,” said analysts Adrian Cox and Stefan Abrudan in a note to clients today.

Their data was drawn from transactions processed by third-party financial institutions in the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, representing 15% of ChatGPT users.

OpenAI has previously said it had 20 million paying subscribers and 1 billion weekly active users, and will generate $13 billion in revenue this year. More Europeans pay for ChatGPT than subscribe to Disney Plus, Cox and Abrudan wrote.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.