TL;DRThe Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI missed internal targets for revenue and user growth, including a goal of one billion weekly ChatGPT users by end of 2025. OpenAI called the report “prime clickbait” and said it is “firing on all cylinders,” but the market wiped tens of billions off Oracle (-7.7%), CoreWeave (-7.4%), SoftBank (-10%), and chip stocks. The real issue is whether OpenAI’s $600 billion in compute commitments can be justified when Anthropic has overtaken it in revenue, its own CFO has questioned the IPO timeline, and growth is slowing against competitors.
OpenAI called the report “prime clickbait.” It said its business is “firing on all cylinders.” It issued a joint statement from CEO Sam Altman and CFO Sarah Friar declaring they are “totally aligned.” None of it worked. On Tuesday, after the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI had missed internal revenue and user growth targets, investors wiped tens of billions of dollars off the companies whose business models depend on OpenAI’s growth assumptions being correct. Oracle, which signed a $300 billion five-year partnership to supply computing power to OpenAI, dropped 7.7 per cent. CoreWeave, which has an $11.9 billion infrastructure contract with OpenAI, fell 7.4 per cent. SoftBank, which has committed $60 billion to OpenAI, sank almost 10 per cent in Tokyo. Nvidia, Broadcom, AMD, and Arm all declined between 2 and 6 per cent. The market did not care what OpenAI called the report. It cared whether the money works.
