OpenAI's revenue falls $20 billion short of estimates, tech stocks slide

A financial document shown to OpenAI investors reveals its annualized revenue is about $20 billion short of earlier expectations. By the end of September, the figure is closing in on $50 billion, well below the $70 billion that media outlets estimated last month.

The gap comes from different counting methods. Anthropic includes sales made through cloud partners like AWS and Google Cloud, while OpenAI leaves those out, so direct comparisons pushed estimates too high.

Annualized revenue is a key gauge of global AI demand, and it supports massive computing infrastructure spending and rising stock prices.

After the report came out, US tech stocks dropped. The Nasdaq 100 closed down 1.4%, with Nvidia falling 2.9%, Oracle down 5.5%, and Micron down 4.8%.