OpenAI’s Revenue Falls $20 Billion Short of Expectations, Sending A.I. Stocks Lower
Trending Topics Jakob Steinschaden ● Covered by 4 sources
OpenAI’s revenue was closer to $50 billion than $70 billion, and that gap shook AI stocks. The number was mostly accounting, but Wall Street hates surprises.
Based on reporting by Trending Topics, Jakob Steinschaden — read the original for the full story.
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OpenAI walked into Thursday with a number that had already been inflated by the market. According to the Financial Times, the company told investors its annualized revenue was just under $50 billion at the end of September. A bit earlier, reports had pushed that figure to almost $70 billion. That mismatch was enough to rattle AI shares almost immediately.
The gap, the FT says, came down to accounting. Anthropic includes revenue generated through cloud partners such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud in full. OpenAI only books the portion it actually keeps. Once investors tried to compare the two businesses on the same footing, they scaled OpenAI up from roughly $40 billion in August to about $70 billion after the company said growth was above 70 percent. That was always more of a projection than a hard number.
Under OpenAI’s own method, the company would sit below Anthropic, which reported annualized revenue of $65 billion back in July using the more generous gross method. And annualized revenue is not the same thing as revenue already in the bank; it just projects the current pace across a full year. For all of 2025, OpenAI brought in about $13 billion, according to audited figures.
Markets did not wait around for the footnotes. Within half an hour on Thursday afternoon, the Nasdaq 100 had dropped more than 300 points, while the Nasdaq Composite was down about 1.4 percent at one stage. Nvidia, Oracle and CoreWeave were among the names hit hardest, CNBC said. The mood was already brittle, with 30-year Treasury yields at their highest level in more than two decades and oil above $100 a barrel.
OpenAI pushed back on Friday. Bloomberg reported that the company expects to reach or top $70 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2026, with enterprise business doing most of the work. Nasdaq 100 futures nudged up after that. Still, the timing is awkward: OpenAI is said to be seeking new funding at a $1.4 trillion valuation, and it is not expected to go public before early 2027. Anthropic may get there first, and Wall Street is already watching.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what happens when AI valuations start pretending projections are revenue. The whole sector keeps selling scale before it can prove it can hold onto cash, and investors keep acting shocked when the math gets less flattering. Gross accounting can make a company look taller, but it does not make the rent cheaper.
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