OpenAI’s reported annualised revenue came in about $20 billion (€17.8bn) below an earlier estimate, helping send the Nasdaq down 1.25% and dragging chipmakers and cloud companies lower on Thursday. By Friday, Nasdaq 100 futures were about 0.8% higher, while S&P 500 futures had risen 0.4%. A dispute over how to count sales shook investor confidence in the AI boom.
A number built two ways
The Financial Times reported Thursday that OpenAI’s annualised revenue was “approaching $50 billion (€44.6bn)” at the end of September, based on figures shared with investors. The roughly $70 billion (€62.5bn) figure circulating the previous month was an estimate, not a company forecast. The gap doesn’t mean OpenAI missed a target or lost sales.
The difference comes down to accounting. OpenAI’s backers recalculated revenue using rival Anthropic’s method, which counts customer spending on its AI models through cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. OpenAI excludes those sales from its own revenue figure. One business, two methods. A market eager to price the future must decide which number it wants to believe.
OpenAI hadn’t publicly reacted to the reports when the article was written. The accounting dispute matters as the company, valued at $852 billion (€760bn) in March, reportedly sought at least $30 billion (€26.7bn) in new funding at a $1.4 trillion (€1.25tn) valuation. That’s a vast private-market price tag resting on figures investors are still trying to compare.
Taken at face value, OpenAI’s reported figure sat below the $65 billion (€58bn) in annualised revenue Anthropic reportedly reached at the end of July. But the accounting methods differ, making a direct comparison difficult. Investors are weighing the numbers in a contest between companies and their backers, not treating them as a clean, common measure of sales.
When the market flinches
Companies tied to OpenAI’s growth took some of the sharpest falls Thursday. Oracle, which agreed to supply OpenAI with extensive computing power, dropped 5.5%. AI cloud specialist CoreWeave, which has multibillion-dollar contracts with OpenAI, lost nearly 8%.
Microsoft, a major OpenAI shareholder, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta each fell by more than 1%. Like Oracle, those four hyperscalers are investing heavily in AI data centres. Nvidia fell almost 3%, AMD dropped around 4%, and Broadcom, which is building a custom chip with OpenAI, fell 4.35%. In Tokyo on Friday, SoftBank Group, which owns about 13% of OpenAI, fell as much as 7.3% before recovering some losses. The bets stretch across shareholders, cloud suppliers and chipmakers. One wobble in projected revenue moved through the whole chain.
The hardware keeps selling
Other figures that week pointed to continuing demand for AI hardware. Samsung estimated Thursday that its third-quarter operating profit reached a record 107.4 trillion won, or $80.2 billion (€71.5bn). If confirmed, that would mark the largest quarterly operating profit ever reported by a technology company, above the $63.7 billion (€56.8bn) recorded by U.S. chip designer Nvidia in its latest quarter.
Taiwan’s TSMC, the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, said Thursday that September sales rose 54.6% year on year, lifting third-quarter revenue to a record NT$1.49 trillion, or $46.8 billion (€41.8bn). Investors were due to get more figures when Dutch chip-equipment maker ASML reported on Oct. 14 and TSMC on Oct. 15. Potential listings by Anthropic as soon as November and by OpenAI the following year could put audited accounts in public view. Until then, the AI trade runs on private-company figures, competing accounting rules and investors’ appetite for the next valuation.