{"id":622153,"date":"2026-09-12T05:56:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-12T05:56:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/622153\/"},"modified":"2026-09-12T05:56:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-12T05:56:12","slug":"openai-paused-its-200-chatgpt-sign-ups-as-unprecedented-demand-for-astra-strains-its-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/622153\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI paused its $200 ChatGPT sign-ups as \u2018unprecedented\u2019 demand for Astra strains its system"},"content":{"rendered":"

When OpenAI launched Astra last week \u2014 a model whose advanced abilities prompted OpenAI president Greg Brockman to call it the start of the \u201cAGI era\u201d<\/a> \u2014 it only gave a handful<\/a> of enterprise customers access to give the company time to scale its compute capacity.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

But now that it\u2019s available to paying users, demand for Astra has soared to the point where OpenAI temporarily won\u2019t take your money for its $200-per-month ChatGPT Pro plan, where Astra is available<\/a>, because there\u2019s not enough capacity to go around.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The company announced<\/a> on Thursday it\u2019s pausing new sign-ups and upgrades to the most expensive plan on the Pro tier, which provides 20 times the usage of the Plus tier below it. OpenAI\u2019s head of product Thibault Sottiaux wrote on X<\/a> that the reason behind the halt was that the $200 plan puts the most strain on the AI lab\u2019s systems.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to take the smallest step that allows us to continue giving the broadest access possible,\u201d he said, adding that OpenAI is \u201cworking on adding more capacity\u201d and that existing Pro accounts are unaffected.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A day earlier, Sottiaux said demand<\/a> for Astra was \u201cunprecedented\u201d and warned that the company \u201cmight have to pause new Pro subscriptions for a bit\u201d if it continued.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re pulling all the levers possible to sustain the demand, but I\u2019ve not seen anything like it until now and we went through very steep growth before,\u201d he wrote on X.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Astra\u2019s design helps explain why too many users on it might strain OpenAI\u2019s infrastructure. Its marquee feature, called \u201ccomputer use,\u201d<\/a> allows it to interact with a desktop the way a human would, like filling out forms and navigating web pages at \u201csuperhuman speed,\u201d Brockman told reporters.<\/a> OpenAI also said <\/a>Astra can burn through users\u2019 usage allowances faster than its previous flagship model GPT 5.6 Sol.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Compute constraints<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t the first time OpenAI paused new subscriptions to paid tiers due to lack of capacity. In November 2023, OpenAI temporarily halted sign-ups to the $20-per-month-ChatGPT Plus plan after the company\u2019s first developer conference<\/a> led to a surge in demand.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe surge in usage post devday has exceeded our capacity and we want to make sure everyone has a great experience,\u201d OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on X<\/a> at the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Since then, the company has grown its capacity. OpenAI said<\/a> its available compute rose from 0.2 gigawatts in 2023 to about 1.9 GW in 2025, a 9.5-fold increase over two years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also trying to keep up in the race<\/a> to grab more of it, even as concerns swirl that a potential bursting of the AI bubble could leave a glut of computing capacity behind<\/a>. AI hardware like GPUs, the computer chips that run the calculations used to train AI, can depreciate in a few years<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

OpenAI expanded beyond its partner Microsoft<\/a> Azure for the hardware required for compute, adding cloud-computing company CoreWeave and launching Stargate<\/a>, a $500 billion, four-year AI infrastructure buildout. <\/p>\n

OpenAI has also lined up a wave of new capacity beginning in the second half of 2026. This includes plans for at least 10 GW<\/a> of Nvidia<\/a> systems, a 6-GW Advanced Micro Devices<\/a> agreement for GPUs, and a Broadcom partnership<\/a> to deploy 10 GW of custom AI accelerators.\u00a0<\/p>\n

OpenAI did not respond to Fortune\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When OpenAI launched Astra last week \u2014 a model whose advanced abilities prompted OpenAI president Greg Brockman to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":622154,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,1682,216,80],"class_list":["post-622153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-openai","tag-tech","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=622153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622153\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/622154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=622153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=622153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=622153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}