ChatGPT Ads Opens Across Southeast Asia and Taiwan

OpenAI opened ChatGPT Ads across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan on 23 September 2026, taking its advertiser list from 56 countries to 63. Vietnam's 19,000 VND minimum daily budget, about 0.72 US dollars, is now the lowest entry point on the platform anywhere in the world.

What opened

OpenAI's announcement was short and named every country: "Starting today, ChatGPT Ads will begin rolling out across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Taiwan." It placed the wave after the earlier Asia-Pacific launches in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and India.

Buying runs through the same three doors as everywhere else: OpenAI's Ads Solutions team, its agency partners, and self-serve through Ads Manager for eligible businesses. The self-serve half is the part that matters for anyone spending a few thousand a month, and it is live.

Singapore is the entry worth calling out, because it is the one this site had been listing as unavailable. It sat outside the list through the European opening in August, the Indian and North African wave on 31 August, and the Gulf additions on 16 September. It joined in the platform's seventh month.

The advertiser list, and the serving list, are the same list today

These have been two different questions since August, and for a while the honest answer for several countries was that a business could buy without OpenAI confirming that anyone would see the ad.

That gap closed on 24 September. Posting a campaign with a deliberately invalid country code makes OpenAI's advertiser API reject the request and print every country it will accept, and the list it returned was exactly the 63 on the availability table. Six markets moved on that one response: Algeria, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Oman and Tunisia had all been buy-only here since 2 September because OpenAI named a region and never those countries. They can be targeted today.

The two lists will come apart again on the next expansion, because they always have.

The new minimums, and why India lost its title

The minimum daily budget table on OpenAI's campaign documentation moved with the country list, from 23 billing currencies to 30. Every new row is cheap.

India had been the cheapest place in the world to learn this platform with real money since it opened. It is now eighth. It remains the cheapest of the large markets, and for anyone whose customers are actually in Southeast Asia the floor is now low enough that budget stops being the reason to wait.

A floor is not a plan. Spending 0.72 dollars a day buys a rounding error, and OpenAI's own guidance is that a daily budget works as a delivery target: the budget week runs Sunday to Saturday, a single day can spend twice the daily figure, and the week will not exceed seven times it. What the low minimum really buys is the ability to run a genuine test without committing a European-sized budget first. Our own floor is unchanged at 15 EUR a day, because that is where a campaign starts producing numbers you can act on.

Sub-country targeting stopped being a US feature

Buried in the same documentation update, and larger than the country list for anyone already running campaigns: OpenAI now says campaigns can target states or regions, cities, markets and postal codes "where available", with availability varying by country. Until September that existed only in the United States.

Two conditions come with it. New product-feed campaigns are country-level only, and feed campaigns that already carried sub-national selections keep them without being able to add more. And "where available" is doing real work: search for a location during campaign setup to find out whether OpenAI has it, because a city that exists in one market may not exist in another.

What else moved in the same update

• Platform targeting and reporting. A campaign can be pointed at any of five platforms: Android app, Android web, desktop web, iOS app and iOS web. Insights segments by the same five.

• Custom audiences are off the table in Europe. OpenAI tells advertisers to avoid custom audiences on campaigns targeting the EEA or Switzerland while ads personalization is unavailable there. The 25,000 matched-user floor for inclusion is unchanged.

• Ads do not appear in the ChatGPT Atlas browser during the test, which trims the reachable audience below the free-tier headcount.

• The home-country rule still applies to new accounts. Some new self-serve accounts can at first advertise only in their home country. Other countries unlock once identity verification is approved and the account has spent enough on campaigns at home, and OpenAI does not publish the amount.

What to do with it

If your business is registered in one of the seven, the account is the first move and it takes a verified legal name, a registration number and a locally billed card. If your customers are in the seven and your entity is not, nothing blocks you: targeting is set per campaign from anywhere on the list.

Early auctions in a new market are thin auctions, which is the whole reason to move now rather than at the end of the quarter. What decides the outcome is the same as everywhere else: a hundred reviewed ads across distinct intents, context hints written from real prompt research, and conversion tracking wired before the first campaign runs.

The full country-by-country reference with a dated log of every change is on our ChatGPT Ads availability page. The complete ChatGPT Ads guide covers the build, the costs guide carries the full 30-currency minimum table, and the 30-second eligibility checker tells you where your own entity stands.