OpenAI pauses $200 ChatGPT Pro sign-ups as Astra demand strains its systems

OpenAI has stopped selling the $200 tier of ChatGPT Pro, saying demand for its Astra model is straining its systems. European organisations face a second constraint the pause does not touch, because Astra still has no EU data zone deployment and no paid option keeps processing inside the EU data boundary.

OpenAI has paused new sign-ups to the $200 tier of ChatGPT Pro, TechCrunch reported, citing the load its newest model is putting on its systems. Astra launched on 3 September. Existing subscribers keep their plans.

The company’s help pages name the paused tier as Pro 20X. The $100 Pro plan remains on sale, along with Plus, Go, the API and enterprise accounts.

For European buyers the harder problem sits elsewhere. Astra reached Microsoft Foundry with no European data zone, and that has not changed.

Foundry lists the model across 26 regions. All six of its data zone deployments are American.

European regions such as France Central and Germany West Central carry Astra only as a global deployment. Processing can then happen in any Azure region. No paid option keeps the model inside the EU data boundary.

Thibault Sottiaux, who leads product for Codex and ChatGPT, said the pause was the least disruptive option available. “We wanted to take the smallest step that allows us to continue giving the broadest access possible,” he wrote in a post quoted by TechCrunch.

He had said the previous day that demand for Astra was unprecedented. OpenAI also paused Astra in August, for a different reason, after deciding it could not rule out critical cyber capability.

That pause was about safety. This one is about supply.

European regulators are still working through the first. ENISA received access about a week after launch and is testing the model alongside Anthropic’s Mythos 5, according to the Commission.

Analysts read the freeze as a signal about allocation rather than a consumer inconvenience. Bhupendra Chopra, chief revenue officer at Kanerika, told Computerworld that frontier capacity is still rationed.

“Consumer power users are the release valve,” he said. “Enterprise contracts are what the vendor protects.”

His advice was to treat model capacity as a supply chain dependency. A subscription buys a place in the queue, he said, while a fixed slice of compute comes only from a contract.

That is an awkward trade in Europe, because the contract that guarantees capacity does not guarantee where the data is processed. OpenAI says it is adding capacity as fast as it can, and gave no reopening date. Until an EU deployment appears, Europe’s cloud dependency applies to models as well as to servers.