Financial documents shared with OpenAI's investors show its annualized revenue running about $20 billion below the figure the company had signaled, the Financial Times reported. US tech stocks fell sharply following the report, and the Nasdaq Composite closed well off the record high it set two sessions earlier.
Investors had expected OpenAI's annualized revenue near $70 billion, but the real figure is closer to $50 billion, according to financial documents shared with backers. That gap sent AI-linked stocks tumbling and knocked the Nasdaq off its recent highs.
Revenue figures don't match what investors heard
OpenAI recently told investors its revenue was nearing $50 billion on an annualized basis at the end of September, far short of the $70 billion reported by the Financial Times and other outlets late last month. Annualized revenue, along with the matching figure for rival Anthropic, is the clearest signal of AI demand investors have, and it underpins vast infrastructure spending and the growth of public equity markets.
The discrepancy traces to investors' attempts to make OpenAI's figure comparable with Anthropic's, which includes revenue from cloud partners such as Amazon's AWS and Google Cloud while OpenAI's does not. That adjustment pushed early estimates toward $40 billion in July. OpenAI later told its backers that annualized revenue had jumped more than 70% since July, which is how the $70 billion figure emerged. However, the new investor presentation instead shows close to $30 billion in annualized revenue for July.
Nasdaq slides as AI names retreat
US tech stocks fell sharply after the report, with the Nasdaq 100 closing down 1.4% on Thursday.
Nvidia fell 2.9% in the same session. Oracle dropped 5.5%. Micron declined 4.8%.
Record high erased within two sessions
The Nasdaq Composite closed down 337.38 points, a 1.23% decline, to 27,201.31 that day. Just two trading days earlier, the index had climbed to a record high of 27,722.75, and it had already eased to 27,538.69 at the prior close before Thursday's drop.
OpenAI stays quiet as IPO talk continues
OpenAI declined to comment on the figures. The company is in talks with investors about a new funding round that could value it at about $1.4 trillion, with annualized revenue the key metric backers use to measure its progress against Anthropic.
Chief executive Sam Altman said the startup will not "barrel all guns blazing towards an IPO" while AI capabilities keep advancing rapidly, after the company delayed plans for a listing it had confidentially filed for in June.
Sources: Financial Times, Crypto Briefing
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