Amazon DSP Now Sells ChatGPT Ad Inventory in OpenAI Partnership

Amazon Ads has partnered with OpenAI to let select US advertisers extend their campaigns into ChatGPT. Advertisers purchase the placements through Amazon DSP, the company's programmatic ad platform, without negotiating directly with OpenAI.

Delta Vacations is among the first brands testing the pilot. Amazon sets up and manages the campaigns, while OpenAI's ad system still decides which ads actually appear and where. The ads show up as text or images beneath a ChatGPT response, clearly labeled as sponsored.

Conversational ads represent the fastest growing engagement opportunity for brands to reach new and existing audiences.

The deal marks a shift for Amazon, which had previously blocked ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini from accessing its retail ecosystem even as it built competing AI shopping tools.

Amazon's value to OpenAI isn't just audience reach — ChatGPT already has hundreds of millions of users. Instead, Amazon provides a fully built advertiser relationship and buying infrastructure that OpenAI doesn't have to construct from scratch.

OpenAI's ad business crossed a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate in early September, but the company is privately targeting $100 billion in advertising revenue by 2030. That pace would require sustained growth above 200% annually.

"They're still trying to build out even many of the basics of a functional ad sales operation," Nate Elliott, principal analyst at eMarketer, told industry observers. That gap is exactly what the Amazon deal fills.

Until now, advertisers could buy ChatGPT ads only directly from OpenAI or through smaller ad-tech intermediaries including Criteo and Kargo. Amazon's advertising segment alone generated more than $70 billion on a trailing 12-month basis this year, dwarfing the scale of those existing partners.

The partnership gives OpenAI access to advertiser relationships, budgets, and campaign infrastructure Amazon has spent two decades building. Advertisers can now route the entire transaction through infrastructure Amazon already owns.

Every prior expansion of ChatGPT advertising — the self-serve ads manager, new country rollouts, falling minimum spend thresholds — involved OpenAI selling its own inventory directly. What changed now is an advertiser can buy ChatGPT ad space without ever setting up a direct relationship with OpenAI at all.

For Amazon, the arrangement extends its advertising reach onto a surface it doesn't own, host, or fully control end to end, a notable concession for a company that has guarded its retail data closely.

For OpenAI, it's a bet that the fastest way to scale a $1 billion ad business into a $100 billion one isn't building a sales operation from the ground up — it's plugging into infrastructure another company already built at massive scale, even if that means sharing control over exactly who gets to advertise on ChatGPT and how.