Nvidia and Oracle under pressure: OpenAI misses goals and drags partners down

Shares of companies closely associated with OpenAI are under pressure after The Wall Street Journal reported that the AI startup failed to meet its revenue and user growth targets. The news raises concerns about the high level of investment in artificial intelligence, just ahead of the quarterly figures of major tech companies.

SoftBank shares fell by almost ten percent after the news. In U.S. forex trading, CoreWeave and Oracle lost about seven percent, while Nvidia was down about three percent.

Although OpenAI works with dozens of companies, the market mainly focuses on a select group of large partners. In addition to SoftBank, Oracle, CoreWeave and AMD, Nvidia and Microsoft also belong to this group. Investors use these shares as a measure of OpenAI's success, because the company itself is not listed on the stock exchange.

Investors increasingly want evidence that tech companies are sticking to their ambitious plans for investing in AI infrastructure. The bar is high, and any deviation is immediately punished.

“That's what the market needs to keep the AI story going,” says Amanda Lyons, head of research at Energy Group Capital. “It is a difficult balance: signals of weakening investments are interpreted negatively for the entire ecosystem. But a sudden acceleration raises questions about efficiency and shelf life."

OpenAI, for a long time the clear frontrunner in the AI race, missed several monthly revenue targets in 2026. At the same time, competitors are gaining ground. For example, Anthropic is making progress in markets for programming tools and business applications, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday based on anonymous sources.

The image that sets the tone for OpenAI began to change last autumn. AI models such as Gemini from Alphabet and Claude from Anthropic received wide praise from both users and companies. New updates from these competitors also regularly put sales pressure on shares that serve as a measure of OpenAI.

“The growth of OpenAI has been phenomenal since the launch of ChatGPT, but competitors are now getting closer from all sides,” says Anna Macdonald, director of investment strategy at Hargreaves Lansdown.