On Tuesday morning, a single Wall Street Journal report put the brakes on AI euphoria in the stock market. OpenAI has missed several internal growth targets — and the market reaction was swift.
The numbers
OpenAI aimed to reach one billion weekly active ChatGPT users by the end of 2025. The actual number sits at around 900 million — impressive, but below their own target. More importantly: the company missed multiple monthly revenue targets earlier in 2026.
That might sound like small potatoes for a company generating $2 billion in monthly revenue. But here’s the problem: OpenAI has committed to roughly $600 billion in future data center spending. If revenue doesn’t grow as planned, that bill becomes hard to pay.
Tension at the top
The most explosive detail: according to Fortune, there are tensions between CFO Sarah Friar and CEO Sam Altman. Friar reportedly warned internally that ballooning compute costs could outpace revenue if growth doesn’t hold up. Altman’s thesis has always been that compute scarcity is the bottleneck — not demand. That assumption might be wrong.
Market reaction
Oracle, which has a $300 billion five-year deal with OpenAI, dropped more than 6%. Nvidia fell about 3%, AMD about 5%, Broadcom roughly 3%. The entire AI infrastructure sector took a hit.
What it means
This isn’t a crisis — not yet. OpenAI generates enormous revenue, just raised $122 billion, and is heading toward an IPO. But the report undercuts the core assumption behind most AI investment: that demand always grows faster than supply.
If even OpenAI — the company with the biggest consumer AI product in the world — can’t hit its growth targets, the question becomes: how realistic are the billion-dollar bets the entire industry is making?
For Anthropic and other competitors, it’s a mixed signal. On one hand, the market might not be as boundless as hoped. On the other, it makes OpenAI more vulnerable — especially now that the Microsoft exclusivity deal has been loosened.
Sources: