OpenAI fell short of internal revenue and new user goals ahead of a potential IPO later this year – raising concerns about whether it will be able to offset massive spending on AI, according to a report.
Shares in tech firms Oracle and SoftBank fell 3.4% and 11.3%, respectively, Tuesday as the report reheated fears of an AI spending bubble similar to the dot-com crisis of the early 2000s.
The disappointing results have reportedly sowed doubt among top leadership, as Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar has raised concerns that the company might not be able to pay for future computing contracts if its growth doesn’t speed up, the Wall Street Journal reported late Monday.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, meanwhile, has signed the firm up for $600 billion in future spending commitments on the idea that extra data-center capacity will fuel ChatGPT’s growth, sources told the WSJ.
In the meantime, the firm has missed an internal goal of 1 billion weekly active ChatGPT users by the end of last year; missed a yearly revenue target for ChatGPT; missed multiple monthly revenue targets this year; and struggled with subscriber defection rates, the report said.
“We are totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can and working hard on it together every day,” Altman and Friar told the Journal in a joint statement, adding that any suggestion otherwise is “ridiculous.”
A spokesperson for OpenAI told The Post that “this is clickbait from our friends at the WSJ.”
“Sarah just raised $122B with a plan that outlines our compute strategy in detail, so think that should be all the evidence you need that there is full alignment in the strategy!” the spokesperson said, adding that “business is firing on all cylinders.”
The spokesperson nodded to a positive response to new ChatGPT features like ads and AI image generation and fast growth in its coding tool Codex – claiming its massive compute deals have driven these successes.
OpenAI and News Corp, which owns The Post, have a content-licensing deal.
OpenAI also recently launched ChatGPT-5.5, a powerful model that exceeded industry standards, and is cutting down on costs by scrapping projects like its AI video app Sora.
But the company has signed up for so much computing power in the coming years that it expects to burn through the $122 billion in funding in just three years, according to the Journal.
In a recent memo to investors, OpenAI boasted that it has clinched more computing power than Anthropic – and seemingly jabbed at the rival firm’s CEO Dario Amodei, who recently said some companies had pulled “the risk dial too far” on data-center spending, the report said.
“In hindsight, that caution looks less like discipline and more like understanding how fast demand would arrive,” OpenAI said in the memo, per the report.
But in recent months, after ChatGPT’s growth slowed at the end of the last year, board directors have started questioning Altman’s efforts to secure more computing power, sources told the Journal.
Friar has also expressed reservations about OpenAI’s plans to go public by the end of the year, arguing to execs and board directors that the company isn’t ready to meet the reporting standards required of a public company, the report said.
Altman – who is currently entangled in a legal battle with Elon Musk – has favored a more aggressive timeline for an IPO, according to the report.
