OpenAI Misses Revenue and User Targets, WSJ Report Rattles AI Stocks

OpenAI has fallen short of its own internal revenue and user growth targets in the months leading up to its planned IPO, according to a Wall Street Journal report published Tuesday. The story sent technology stocks lower, with Oracle, Nvidia, Broadcom, and AMD all sliding on concerns that the company at the center of the AI infrastructure boom may be growing slower than the spending it has set in motion.

The report cited internal documents and people familiar with OpenAI's performance. According to the WSJ, ChatGPT did not hit an internal goal of one billion weekly active users by the end of 2025, and OpenAI missed multiple monthly revenue targets earlier this year as competitors gained ground.

What the WSJ Found

OpenAI's growth slowed late last year as Google's Gemini surged and Anthropic captured a larger share of the enterprise and coding markets. ChatGPT's annual revenue target slipped out of reach as a result, and the chatbot's user growth failed to reach the round number — one billion weekly active users — that OpenAI had set internally as a 2025 milestone.

CFO Sarah Friar has reportedly warned colleagues that the company could face difficulty funding its massive compute commitments if revenue growth doesn't accelerate. OpenAI has signed multi-hundred-billion-dollar agreements with Oracle, Microsoft, and Broadcom, and has tied much of its business to Nvidia's GPU supply. Each of those deals assumes a revenue trajectory that the WSJ report suggests OpenAI is currently below.

Board directors have also been scrutinizing recent data-center deals more closely, the report said, and are questioning CEO Sam Altman's push for additional compute capacity in the face of slowing top-line momentum.

OpenAI's Pushback

OpenAI rejected the framing of the report. In a statement to CNBC, the company said: "This is ridiculous. We are totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can and working hard on it together every day." The company has not disputed any specific numbers in the WSJ story.

Outside estimates support the idea that OpenAI is still growing fast in absolute terms — just not as fast as its own internal plans projected. Sacra estimated OpenAI hit $25 billion in annualized revenue in February 2026, up from $20 billion at the end of 2025. Friar herself confirmed the $20 billion figure in January. The issue, per the WSJ, is that even those numbers fell below what OpenAI had told its board and key partners to expect.

Why This Matters for the Market

The report landed in a market that has priced in OpenAI's growth as the load-bearing assumption for an entire chain of AI infrastructure stocks. Oracle dropped more than 4% on the news. Nvidia, Broadcom, and AMD each fell roughly 3% to 4%. Taiwan Semiconductor also slipped.

Each of those companies has, in some way, anchored its 2026 outlook to OpenAI demand. Oracle's $300 billion compute deal with OpenAI was widely cited as the reason the database giant's stock re-rated higher last year. Nvidia's data-center segment depends heavily on OpenAI's purchases for GPU clusters. Broadcom is supplying custom chips for OpenAI's planned in-house silicon program.

If OpenAI is paying for compute with revenue it hasn't yet booked, the math behind those forward-looking deals starts to look thinner. That's the question Wall Street started asking on Tuesday morning.

The IPO Context

The timing matters because OpenAI is actively laying groundwork for an IPO. The company hired Cynthia Gaylor as its first head of investor relations earlier this year. Internal targets reportedly include filing in the second half of 2026 and listing in 2027, with a potential valuation of up to $1 trillion.

A trillion-dollar IPO is only credible if the underlying revenue growth justifies it. Late-2025 forecasts that circulated among investors had OpenAI hitting roughly $50 billion in run-rate revenue by late 2026 — a number that depends on ChatGPT continuing to scale users at the pace OpenAI projected. The WSJ report is the first significant signal that those projections may need to be revised down.

What Industry Observers Are Saying

Analysts who cover the AI sector have been watching for exactly this kind of disclosure. Several pointed out that OpenAI's competitors — particularly Anthropic, which has reported run-rate revenue surpassing $30 billion — have been chipping away at enterprise accounts that OpenAI assumed would be locked in. Coding workloads, where Anthropic's Claude has built strong developer mindshare, are the clearest example. Google's Gemini, meanwhile, has gained share in consumer multimodal use cases.

The pattern is one of OpenAI losing margin on multiple fronts simultaneously, not a single big competitor displacing it.

What's Next

OpenAI has not commented on a revised revenue forecast, and the company hasn't officially confirmed an IPO timeline. The next data point investors will look for is OpenAI's voluntary disclosure to its commercial partners — Oracle and Microsoft both have visibility into OpenAI's compute commitments, and any softening in those orders would show up in their next earnings reports.

For ChatGPT users, the immediate effect is nil. The product continues to ship updates, and OpenAI is still spending at the pace of a company that expects to grow into its commitments. The bigger question is whether the next quarter shows the kind of acceleration that quiets the IPO concerns — or whether Tuesday's selloff is the start of a longer reset on AI infrastructure expectations.

Bottom Line

OpenAI is still the most valuable AI company in the world, and a single missed quarter doesn't change that. But the WSJ report puts a number on something the market has been quietly worrying about: the gap between AI spending and AI revenue. If that gap widens through 2026, the trillion-dollar IPO thesis gets harder to defend — and so do the stocks that have been riding OpenAI's growth assumptions.