OpenAI has missed its own targets for revenue and new users, raising concern inside the company about whether it can sustain its sprawling data center commitments, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Revenue growth that fails to pick up speed could leave OpenAI without the means to honor future computing contracts, CFO Sarah Friar has told colleagues, The Journal reported. Members of the board have taken a harder look at OpenAI’s data center agreements and raised doubts about Altman’s drive to acquire still more computing power even as growth slows, the outlet added.
OpenAI and Friar pushed back on the report. “We are totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can and working hard on it together every day,” the two said in a joint statement to CNBC. Any suggestion that the pair were divided or pulling back on computing resources was “ridiculous,” they said.
An internal milestone of one billion weekly active ChatGPT users by year’s end went unmet, The Journal reported. ChatGPT’s annual revenue target also slipped out of reach as Google’s Gemini surged late in the year and claimed a bigger slice of the market; separately, Anthropic’s gains in coding and enterprise pushed OpenAI below its monthly revenue goals on several occasions earlier this year. OpenAI has also faced subscriber defection rates, the outlet reported.
The spending scrutiny complicates Altman’s ambitions ahead of a potential IPO by the end of the year. Separately, Friar has raised doubts about OpenAI’s readiness to go public on Altman’s preferred schedule, telling executives and board members that the company still lacks the financial infrastructure that public-market regulators demand, The Journal reported.
Stock in companies tied to OpenAI’s infrastructure fell on the report. Oracle stock dropped more than 6%. Nvidia, Broadcom, and Advanced Micro Devices stock each fell between about 3% and 5%. SoftBank Group stock sank about 10% in Asia.
OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round at a post-money valuation of $852 billion — the largest in Silicon Valley history, the company said. The round was anchored by SoftBank, Amazon, and Nvidia, among others. At the time of the raise, OpenAI reported monthly revenue of $2 billion and full-year 2025 revenue of $13.1 billion, though the company had not turned a profit.
The Journal pointed to some bright spots: Codex, OpenAI’s coding tool, has been gaining users, and GPT-5.5 earned top marks across several industry benchmarks after its recent release.
