- OpenAI missed its 1 billion weekly active user goal, a yearly ChatGPT revenue target, and multiple monthly revenue targets in early 2026.
- CFO Sarah Friar told leadership the company may not afford future compute contracts if growth doesn’t accelerate.
- SoftBank fell 11.3%, Oracle dropped 3.4%, and CoreWeave issued a defensive statement after the report.
OpenAI missed its internal target of 1 billion weekly active ChatGPT users by the end of 2025, fell short of a yearly ChatGPT revenue goal, and missed multiple monthly revenue targets earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday. The shortfall comes as CEO Sam Altman has signed the company up for $600 billion in future data-center spending commitments.
The gap between revenue reality and compute ambition has created friction at the top. CFO Sarah Friar has told other executives she’s worried OpenAI might not be able to pay for future computing contracts if revenue doesn’t grow faster, according to the same report. Board directors have also started questioning Altman’s aggressive push for more data-center capacity as ChatGPT’s growth slowed at the end of last year.
“We are totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can and working hard on it together every day,” Altman and Friar said in a joint statement to the Journal, calling any suggestion otherwise “ridiculous.” An OpenAI spokesperson told the New York Post: “This is clickbait from our friends at the WSJ.”
Why the $600 Billion Compute Bet Faces New Scrutiny
OpenAI recently closed a $122 billion funding round — $30 billion from SoftBank, $30 billion from Nvidia, and $50 billion from Amazon — at a $730 billion pre-money valuation, the same valuation that underpins its rumored IPO. But the Journal reports the company expects to burn through that entire sum in roughly three years. The math is blunt: $600 billion in committed compute spending against a business that just missed its own revenue targets, with a SoftBank-backed margin loan still on the books and an AI spending environment drawing increasingly nervous comparisons to the dot-com era.
Friar has also expressed reservations about OpenAI’s plan to go public by the end of 2026, arguing to executives and board directors that the company isn’t ready to meet the reporting standards of a public company, the Journal reported. Altman favors a more aggressive timeline. The internal tension echoes what critics have been saying for months: that the AI debt bubble could rival 2008 if growth assumptions don’t materialize. AI capital expenditure is on track to hit $660 billion this year alone.
OpenAI’s public pushback emphasized its recent wins: 900 million-plus weekly active users on ChatGPT, 50 million-plus consumer subscribers, 9 million-plus paying business users, and 1.6 million weekly Codex users — tripled since the start of the year. The company also pointed to ChatGPT-5.5, new advertising features, and cost cuts from scrapping its Sora video app. In a memo to investors, OpenAI noted it has secured more computing power than Anthropic — and took a direct jab at CEO Dario Amodei, who recently warned some companies had pulled “the risk dial too far” on data-center spending. “In hindsight, that caution looks less like discipline and more like understanding how fast demand would arrive,” the memo read.
Market Fallout and the ‘OpenAI Complex’
The report hit markets immediately. SoftBank fell 11.3% and Oracle dropped 3.4% on Tuesday, with Nvidia, AMD, and CoreWeave also declining. CoreWeave issued a statement emphasizing that “OpenAI is a terrific partner, but not our only one” — a line that reads like it was drafted specifically for a moment when the market starts asking whether compute vendors are overexposed to a single customer.
The selloff wasn’t isolated to infrastructure names. The broader “OpenAI complex” — the network of chipmakers, cloud providers, and data-center operators whose revenue assumptions depend heavily on AI demand continuing its current trajectory — came under pressure. If OpenAI, the single most prominent AI company on the planet, is missing its own internal targets while burning $122 billion every three years, the implications for the entire supply chain are uncomfortable. This week also saw OpenAI end its Microsoft exclusivity in favor of a $250 billion Azure commitment, and Amazon announced an expanded deal to offer OpenAI models on AWS.
OpenAI told investors its top-line revenue target remains $30 billion, according to its most recent investor update. The company has not publicly disclosed what it actually earned.