OpenAI says it’s ‘firing on all cylinders’ after missing revenue and user targets, but market wipes billions off AI stocks

OpenAI called the report “primary clickbait.” He said his business is “firing on all cylinders.” He issued a joint statement of CEO Sam Altman and CFO Sarah Friar stating that they are “totally aligned.” None of that worked. On Tuesday, after Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI had missed its internal revenue and user growth targets, investors wiped tens of billions of dollars from companies whose business models depend on OpenAI’s growth assumptions being correct. Oracle, which signed a five-year, $300 billion partnership to supply computing power to OpenAI, fell 7.7 percent. CoreWeave, which has an $11.9 billion infrastructure contract with OpenAI, fell 7.4 percent. SoftBank, which has committed $60 billion to OpenAI, sank nearly 10 percent in Tokyo. Nvidia, Broadcom, AMD and Arm fell between 2 and 6 percent. The market didn’t care what OpenAI called the report. He cared if the money works.

the objectives

The Journal reported that OpenAI missed an internal goal of reaching 1 billion weekly active ChatGPT users by the end of 2025. The company hit 900 million in February 2026, a figure that represents 125 percent year-over-year growth at a scale where most products have already plateaued. By any normal standard, 900 million weekly users is an astonishing achievement. But OpenAI does not work according to normal standards. It is operating at the standards required to justify $600 billion in computing spending commitments through 2030, a figure the company itself revised downward from $1.4 trillion earlier this year. The Journal also reported that OpenAI missed multiple monthly revenue targets in early 2026, losing ground to Google’s Gemini in consumer markets and to Anthropic in coding and enterprise. OpenAI’s annualized revenue is approximately $25 billion. Anthropo Competitionwhich surpassed $30 billion in annualized revenue in April and spent about a quarter of what OpenAI spends on training, has turned what was a comfortable lead into a deficit. The company that defined the generative AI market is no longer a revenue leader.

Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar internally warned colleagues that if revenue growth does not accelerate, OpenAI could face difficulty funding its future computing deals. The warning is not hypothetical. OpenAI has contracted hundreds of billions of dollars in cloud infrastructure from Oracle, CoreWeave and others, commitments that assume revenue will grow from $25 billion today to $280 billion in 2030. The gap between where revenue is and where it needs to be is not a rounding error. It is the difference between a company that can finance its own ambitions and one that cannot. Friar has also reportedly told colleagues that OpenAI is not organizationally prepared for the IPO that Altman wants to hold in the fourth quarter of 2026, preferring instead a listing in 2027. The joint statement declaring the alignment came after the Journal’s report made the disagreement public.

the answer

OpenAI spokesperson Steve Sharpe called the Journal report “click bait” and said the company’s consumer business is showing revenue strength while its enterprise business is “in the best place I’ve ever been.” The company said the internal mood is “incredibly positive.” These are not rebuttals to the report’s specific claims. The Journal did not say that OpenAI’s business is failing. He said OpenAI fell short of its own goals, that its CFO has expressed concerns about funding future commitments, and that competitors are gaining ground. Calling that clickbait is a communication strategy, not a financial argument.

The company has genuine momentum to highlight. Enterprise revenue now accounts for more than 40 percent of total revenue, with nine million paying business users, up four times from September 2025. OpenAI’s advertising businessLaunched in February, it surpassed $100 million in annualized revenue in six weeks and is projected to generate $2.5 billion this year, rising to $100 billion in 2030. OpenAI’s business drive with GPT-5.5 and rapid model releases demonstrates a company that ships aggressively. And 50 million paying subscribers is a consumer franchise that most tech companies would consider a generational achievement. The problem is not that business is going bad. The problem is that the commitments are enormous and the business must not only be good but have no historical precedents to justify them.

arithmetic

OpenAI’s financial position is defined by a simple asymmetry: its spending commitments are contractual and its revenue projections are aspirational. The company has committed to spending approximately $600 billion on IT infrastructure through 2030, averaging approximately $100 billion per year. To justify that spending, it has set a target of $280 billion in revenue by 2030, which would require more than tenfold growth in four years from its current run rate of $25 billion. He Valuation of 852 billion dollars of its $122 billion funding round in March, the largest private round in Silicon Valley history, was predicated on those growth assumptions being maintained. If they don’t, the valuation also becomes aspirational.

The competitive landscape compounds the pressure. Anthropic’s revenue surpassed $30 billion annualized run rate in April, surpassing OpenAI for the first time, and 80 percent of that revenue comes from enterprise customers spending more than $1 million annually. The number of those clients doubled from 500 to more than 1,000 in less than two months. Google’s Gemini gained consumer market share throughout 2025, impacting ChatGPT’s growth. And the broader picture now includes DeepSeek, Mistral, Meta’s Llama, and a constellation of open models that compete on price in ways that make it harder for a single company to capture enough market share to justify $600 billion in infrastructure. OpenAI’s thesis has always been that scale wins: build the largest models, deploy the most compute, acquire the most users, and the revenue will follow. The WSJ report is the first significant evidence that scaling may not be gaining fast enough.

the guarantee

The market reaction on Tuesday was not about OpenAI’s quarterly performance. It was about the cascade of financial dependencies that underpins OpenAI’s growth narrative. Oracle’s $300 billion cloud partnership, CoreWeave’s $22 billion in cumulative OpenAI contracts, SoftBank’s $60 billion investment, and broader capital spending plans from Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom all mean that demand for AI infrastructure will grow at a pace sufficient to generate returns on the capital being deployed. When the company at the center of that lawsuit admits, even internally, that growth is not meeting projections, the entire chain changes its prices.

This happens in a context that makes the moment particularly uncomfortable. The Musk v. Altman trial began in Oakland on Monday, putting the credibility of OpenAI’s leadership and corporate governance under oath. Anthropic has surpassed OpenAI in revenue and positioned itself as the security-conscious alternative. Google is integrating Gemini into 750 million users and a $240 billion cloud services portfolio. And OpenAI’s own CFO has reportedly questioned whether the company is ready for the public listing its CEO is pushing for this year. The company that defined the AI ​​era is now defending its position on multiple fronts simultaneously, and the market’s verdict on Tuesday was that the defense is still unconvincing. OpenAI says it is firing on all cylinders. Investors who lost billions on Tuesday would like to see the returns.