Turnover of OpenAI turns out to be $20 billion lower than expected: end of AI bull market?

OpenAI is still growing rapidly, but less rapidly than investors thought last night. The Financial Times suddenly reported that OpenAI's annualized revenue was approaching $50 billion at the end of September.

That's about $20 billion less than the $70 billion that investors and media previously assumed.

That setback immediately caused unrest on the stock market on Thursday. The Nasdaq 100 lost 0.9 percent. Nvidia fell 2.1 percent, Oracle 4.5 percent, and Micron 3.6 percent.

The explanation for the sudden decline in annual sales lies mainly in the way in which OpenAI and Anthropic measure their sales.

Anthropic also counts revenue generated through cloud partners such as AWS and Google Cloud. OpenAI does not. Investors tried to make the figures of both companies comparable and therefore calculated OpenAI's turnover artificially higher.

This first created the picture that OpenAI turned around about 40 billion dollars in cancelled sales in July and went towards 70 billion dollars at the end of September. The new presentation shows that it was previously about 30 billion dollars in July.

This setback does not mean that OpenAI suddenly performs poorly. An increase from around 30 billion dollars in July to almost 50 billion dollars at the end of September remains extremely strong.

But the expectations around AI companies are now so high that even enormous growth can be disappointing. And that is exactly why these figures are important for the stock market.

Still, we shouldn't overdo it for now. Today, stock market futures are generally already turning green again. So it is not the case that this immediately undermines the entire AI narrative.

OpenAI has committed hundreds of billions of dollars in future investments in chips, data centers and computing power. At the same time, the company expects to burn nearly $280 billion in cash by 2030.

This makes sales growth crucial. The lower the actual turnover, the greater the question becomes whether the huge infrastructure investments will yield sufficient returns.

In the meantime, OpenAI is discussing a new financing round that can value the company at around 1.4 trillion dollars. It is precisely with such a valuation that any slowdown in growth counts for a lot.

The problem is not that OpenAI is growing slowly, but that investors now expect growth that is almost impossible to sustain flawlessly.