OpenAI revenue revision rattles AI investors
Wall Street was set to recover on Friday morning after confusion over OpenAI’s revenue shook investor faith in the AI trade. Nasdaq 100 futures were up about 0.8% and S&P 500 futures rose 0.4% early Friday, following a sharp sell-off on Thursday. The decline came after the Financial Times reported that OpenAI’s annualised revenue was “approaching $50 billion (€44.6bn)” at the end of September, according to figures shared with investors.
That figure was about $20 billion (€17.8bn) less than the company had projected last month. The Nasdaq Composite fell 1.25% on Thursday to around 27,193, while the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index sank 3.4%. An oil price jump added pressure. However, the gap did not represent a missed target or lost sales: the roughly $70 billion (€62.5bn) figure was an estimate, not a company forecast, and used a different revenue counting method.
Accounting methods drive discrepancy
According to the FT, the higher number came from OpenAI backers recalculating sales to match rival Anthropic’s method. Anthropic counts customer spend on its AI models via cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, as revenue; OpenAI excludes such sales. The OpenAI figure trails the $65 billion (€58bn) Anthropic reportedly hit by end-July, though accounting methods make direct comparison difficult. OpenAI had no public reaction to the reports at the time of writing.
The news hit AI-related stocks. Oracle slid 5.5% on Thursday; the company agreed to supply OpenAI with vast computing power. CoreWeave, an AI cloud specialist with multibillion-dollar OpenAI contracts, lost nearly 8%. Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta all fell more than 1%; Microsoft is a major OpenAI shareholder, and all four hyperscalers are pouring money into AI data centres. Nvidia dropped almost 3%, AMD fell about 4%, and Broadcom lost 4.35%; Broadcom is building a custom chip with OpenAI. In Tokyo on Friday, SoftBank Group shares fell as much as 7.3% before paring losses; SoftBank owns about 13% of OpenAI.
OpenAI was valued at $852 billion (€760bn) in March and is reportedly seeking at least $30 billion (€26.7bn) in fresh funding at a $1.4 trillion (€1.25tn) valuation. Potential listings—Anthropic as soon as November and OpenAI next year—could bring audited accounts into the open. Meanwhile, Samsung estimated a record Q3 operating profit of 107.4 trillion won, or $80.2 billion (€71.5bn), which if confirmed would be the biggest quarterly operating profit ever by a tech company, beating the $63.7 billion (€56.8bn) Nvidia booked in its latest quarter. TSMC said September sales rose 54.6% year-on-year, with Q3 revenue a record NT$1.49 trillion, or $46.8 billion (€41.8bn). ASML reports on 14 October and TSMC on 15 October.
