Stocks tied to large-scale AI compute spending moved lower on Tuesday after a report said OpenAI failed to hit several internal growth and revenue benchmarks, stirring investor unease about the sustainability of the recent AI investment run. In premarket trading by 04:28 ET, shares in Oracle and CoreWeave were down about 3.5%, while AMD slipped roughly 2.7%.
The report quoted people familiar with the matter saying that OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar has privately warned company leaders the firm could have difficulty funding future compute contracts if revenue does not expand sufficiently. That warning has prompted closer board scrutiny of the company’s data center arrangements and sharpened questions about CEO Sam Altman’s push to secure increased computing capacity amid a slowdown in business momentum.
Executives cited in the report said the heightened scrutiny over spending is constraining senior leadership’s ambitions ahead of a possible initial public offering later in the year. The coverage described internal tensions between executives aiming to rein in costs and the CEO’s drive to secure more compute resources, with some senior staff seeking to impose stronger financial discipline.
OpenAI’s top executives issued a joint statement responding to the reporting. In that statement, the CEO and the CFO said they are "totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can and working hard on it together every day," and described any notion of internal division or a pullback on compute resources as "ridiculous."
The report also detailed specific operational misses. OpenAI reportedly fell short of an internal target of reaching one billion weekly active users for ChatGPT by the end of 2024 and missed its annual revenue forecast after Google’s Gemini achieved significant growth late last year, capturing some market share. Earlier this year the company reportedly ceded ground to Anthropic in areas such as coding and enterprise services, missed a number of monthly revenue goals, and struggled with subscriber churn.
Friar has reportedly voiced caution about the timetable for going public, saying the company is not yet ready to meet the stringent reporting requirements a public company would face. The report noted that OpenAI recently closed its largest funding round ever at $122 billion, but that the firm expects to consume that capital within three years even if it meets its revenue targets. Additionally, some of that funding is conditional on partner agreements, the report said.
Market reaction to the report was focused on firms whose businesses are closely tied to large-scale AI compute demand, including cloud and data center providers and chipmakers. Investors appear to be weighing the durability of demand for vast computing contracts against the possibility of tighter internal cost controls at a key AI customer.
Summary
A report indicating that OpenAI missed user and revenue goals and is facing internal debate over compute spending led to premarket declines in companies exposed to heavy AI capital expenditures. Oracle, CoreWeave and AMD were among the names that fell as investors priced in potential pressure on future AI-related spending.