TL;DRGary Marcus warns that OpenAI’s IPO struggles could cascade through the AI supply chain, hitting Nvidia, Oracle, and CoreWeave. With enterprise AI spending already cooling and OpenAI burning $3.7 billion per quarter, the AI researcher sees a credit event risk that nobody has properly priced in.
Gary Marcus has spent years warning that the AI industry is building on shaky foundations. Now he sees a specific chain of dominoes: if OpenAI’s IPO underperforms, the fallout will not stop at one company.
“Their values rely to a significant degree on the expectation that OpenAI will have an immense demand for chips and data centres,” Marcus told Business Insider. “They probably have problems if they don’t get public money.”
The dependency chain
Marcus’s thesis centres on a simple observation: Nvidia, Oracle, and CoreWeave have all benefited enormously from OpenAI’s compute appetite. OpenAI spent $34 billion last year and is on track to burn roughly $27 billion in 2026, according to its financial disclosures.
