What happened to OpenAI’s $20bn? Revenue scare rattles AI trade

US tech futures rebounded on Friday, a day after a report that OpenAI’s annualised revenue was $20 billion (€17.8bn) below earlier estimates helped send the Nasdaq down 1.25% and hit chipmakers and cloud giants. Wall Street looks set to recover some ground on Friday morning after confusion over how much money OpenAI, the ChatGPT maker, is actually bringing in shook investor faith in the artificial intelligence boom. Nasdaq 100 futures were around 0.8% higher, and S&P 500 futures were up 0.4% in early trading on Friday. On Thursday, the Financial Times reported that OpenAI’s annualised revenue, which projects recent sales over a full year, was "approaching $50 billion (€44.6bn)" at the end of September, according to figures shared with investors. That is about $20 billion (€17.8bn) less than the company projected last month. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 1.25% to around 27,193, while the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, which tracks major US chip stocks, sank 3.4%. A jump in oil prices added to the pressure. Where did the $20 billion go? In short, nowhere. The gap does not mean OpenAI missed a target or lost sales: the roughly $70 billion (€62.5bn) figure was an estimate, not a company forecast, built on a different way of counting revenue. According to the FT, the higher number came from OpenAI’s backers recalculating its sales to match the method of rival Anthropic, which counts what customers spend on its AI models through cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud as revenue, while OpenAI excludes such sales. Taken at face value, OpenAI’s figure trails the $65 billion (€58bn) Anthropic reportedly hit at the end of July, although the different accounting methods make a direct comparison difficult. At the time of writing, OpenAI has not publicly reacted to the reports. The figures matter as OpenAI, valued at $852 billion (€760bn) in March, is reportedly seeking at least $30 billion (€26.7bn) in fresh funding at a $1.4 trillion (€1.25tn) valuation. Shares in firms that have bet big on OpenAI’s growth were among the hardest hit after the news broke on Thursday. Oracle, which has agreed to supply OpenAI with vast computing power, slid 5.5%, while CoreWeave, an AI cloud specialist with multibillion-dollar contracts with the firm, lost nearly 8%. Microsoft, a major OpenAI shareholder, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta all fell by more than 1%. Like Oracle, all four are hyperscalers that are pouring money into AI data centres. Chipmakers slid too, with Nvidia down almost 3%, AMD down around 4% and Broadcom, which is building a custom chip with OpenAI, down 4.35%. In Tokyo on Friday, shares in SoftBank Group, which owns about 13% of OpenAI, fell as much as 7.3% before paring losses. Chip demand still strong Despite the negative news, other signals this week suggest demand for AI hardware remains robust. South Korea’s Samsung estimated on Thursday that its third-quarter operating profit hit a record 107.4 trillion won, or $80.2 billion (€71.5bn). The figure, if confirmed, would be the biggest quarterly operating profit ever reported by a technology company, beating the $63.7 billion (€56.8bn) in operating income that US chip designer Nvidia booked in its latest quarter. Taiwan’s TSMC, the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, said the same day that September sales rose 54.6% year-on-year, taking third-quarter revenue to a record NT$1.49 trillion, or $46.8 billion (€41.8bn). Investors will get a clearer read next week, when Dutch chip equipment maker ASML reports on 14 October and TSMC on 15 October. Potential listings by Anthropic, as soon as November, and OpenAI next year could bring their audited accounts into the open.