The Wall Street Journal published a report Monday evening that is reshaping how investors think about the AI infrastructure trade. According to people familiar with the matter, OpenAI missed its internal target of one billion weekly ChatGPT users by end of 2025 — reaching 900 million by February 2026 — and fell short of its annual revenue goal for 2025. More troublingly, OpenAI has reportedly missed multiple monthly revenue targets in early 2026, losing ground to Google’s Gemini in consumer markets and to Anthropic in coding and enterprise. The report landed on the same day Elon Musk took the stand against Sam Altman in a California courtroom, making it one of the most pressured 48-hour periods in OpenAI’s history.
The CFO’s Warning
The most significant detail in the WSJ report is not the missed targets themselves — it’s what CFO Sarah Friar has reportedly said internally about the implications. According to the Journal, Friar has told colleagues she is worried OpenAI may not be able to fund its future computing contracts if revenue doesn’t grow fast enough. She has also reportedly told colleagues that OpenAI is not organizationally ready for the IPO that Sam Altman wants to pursue in Q4 2026, preferring a 2027 listing instead.
Altman and Friar issued a joint statement in response, saying they are “totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can.” The market didn’t find the statement reassuring — and for good reason. OpenAI has committed to approximately $600 billion in future compute spending through 2030. That number assumes revenue will grow from roughly $25 billion today to $280 billion by 2030 — a trajectory that depends entirely on sustained user growth and enterprise adoption continuing at a pace the WSJ report suggests is currently slowing.
The Market Reaction Was Severe
The companies whose business models are most directly tied to OpenAI’s revenue trajectory took the hardest hits:
- Oracle: Down 7.7% — holds a $300 billion cloud partnership with OpenAI
- CoreWeave: Down 7.4% — has $22 billion in cumulative OpenAI contracts
- SoftBank: Down ~10% in Tokyo — committed $60 billion to OpenAI
- NVIDIA: Worst-performing Magnificent 7 component on the day
- AMD and Broadcom: Both off roughly 4%
The Nasdaq-100 fell 1.01% and the broader Nasdaq Composite fell 0.9%. The sell-off is instructive about how AI infrastructure has been priced: not on OpenAI’s current revenue, but on the revenue it was expected to achieve. Any indication that the trajectory is slowing triggers a repricing across the entire chain of companies whose valuations depend on that demand.
Why Revenue Is Slowing
The WSJ report identifies two primary sources of pressure on OpenAI’s growth:
Consumer market share: Google’s Gemini release was considered by many to match or exceed ChatGPT on general tasks — eroding OpenAI’s previously dominant position in the consumer AI assistant market. The report describes a “code red” crisis Altman called internally in late 2025 as Gemini gained ground.
Enterprise and coding: Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI in enterprise revenue, now reporting a $30 billion annualized run rate with over 1,000 enterprise customers spending $1 million or more annually. Claude Code’s dominance in the coding market — where OpenAI’s Codex is still scaling — has cost OpenAI the segment it publicly championed as its primary enterprise growth driver for 2026.
OpenAI’s Response and the Circular Problem
OpenAI called the report “prime clickbait” and said the company is “firing on all cylinders.” The board has separately questioned Altman’s push to secure even more computing power despite the business slowdown — a tension that reflects the fundamental difficulty of OpenAI’s strategic position. The company has committed to spending at a scale that only makes sense if revenue growth is exponential. If growth slows, the compute commitments become liabilities rather than investments. But cutting compute spending would mean falling behind in model capability — which would accelerate the user and revenue loss that prompted the concern in the first place.
One analyst put it clearly: OpenAI has roughly $600 billion in compute commitments through 2030. That number doesn’t make sense unless revenue keeps roughly doubling each year. ChatGPT at 900 million weekly users is a staggering achievement by any normal standard. It’s not a staggering achievement by the standard required to justify that spending.
Conclusion
The WSJ report doesn’t mean OpenAI is failing — $25 billion in annualized revenue and 900 million weekly users is not a struggling business by any conventional measure. But OpenAI is not operating by conventional measures. It is operating by the measures required to justify the most aggressive compute spending commitment in the history of private technology companies. The gap between where it is and where it needs to be is now visible — and the market is repricing accordingly. Browse our directory to explore ChatGPT, Claude, and every AI tool competing in the market OpenAI is fighting to defend.
