The news: Wednesday’s Big Tech earnings blitz saw four of the largest AI spenders—Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft—report Q1 figures under the specter of ballooning AI costs and news that OpenAI had missed internal user and revenue targets, increasing pressure on their advertising businesses to compensate.

That dynamic perhaps explains why OpenAI is telling investors it expects $100 billion in advertising revenues by 2030—a lofty target for a company whose advertising business only spun up weeks ago, but one that still won’t cover the approximately $600 billion in spending commitments OpenAI made last year.

Earnings showed the four companies weathering the storm fairly well. Each posted revenue growth well above analyst expectations, with Google in particular bringing in over $100 billion in revenues for the second time. The search giant attributed the success to AI developments across its business, and its success could set a benchmark for how other big AI spenders are judged.

How advertising fits in: Ads make up a varying portion of each company’s revenues—nearly 98% for Meta and 75% for Google, versus 9% for Amazon and an unclear-but-likely-smaller portion for Microsoft. Each company has made advertising a proving ground for AI’s ability to drive revenues.

Big Tech is injecting AI across their advertising businesses, making it the focus of client-facing ad product launches, new ad space, and user data collection. Amazon debuted ads in its Rufus chatbot, Meta uses its AI chats to inform personalized ads, Google shows ads in its chatbots and AI Overviews, and Microsoft has brought ads to Copilot chats, to name just a fraction of the countless AI launches at each company.

So far those efforts appear to be working. Consumer use of AI interfaces is steadily growing, and each of the four companies has posted meaningful advertising gains quarter after quarter; Google enjoyed its first $100 billion quarter last fall.

Implications for marketing: OpenAI’s ad push repeats a familiar pattern in the tech sector of companies turning to advertising to prove revenue growth or attempt to post a profit, particularly ahead of an IPO. Uber, Instacart, and Reddit all plunged further into the advertising space before they went public, and OpenAI is reportedly eyeing a Q4 2026 IPO date.

That means the number of opportunities to advertise in AI surfaces is likely to increase at a steady pace as OpenAI and others look to prove the technology’s revenue potential.

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