OpenAI Missed Internal Growth Targets, and the Market Wiped Out Tens of Billions

OpenAI is trying to project confidence after a report that the company missed its internal targets for revenue and audience growth. But on April 28, 2026, the market reacted harshly: investors began selling shares of companies whose AI bets are directly tied to OpenAI's success.

Which targets were missed

According to The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI did not reach its internal goal of 1 billion weekly ChatGPT users by the end of 2025. By February 2026 the service had still reached 900 million weekly active users, which is enormous scale and growth of roughly 125% year over year. But the problem is that for OpenAI, the result is judged not as simply good or bad, but as enough or not enough to service its giant commitments for computing infrastructure.

The paper also reported that in early 2026 OpenAI missed its own monthly revenue targets several times. In the consumer market it is under pressure from Gemini, while in coding and the enterprise segment Anthropic is taking share at an increasing pace. According to the report, OpenAI's annual run rate is now about $25 billion, while Anthropic reached roughly $30 billion in April. For a company that effectively set the pace for the entire generative AI market, this is no longer just a slowdown but a loss of revenue leadership.

Why the market is nervous

The investor reaction was not about a single news cycle or a weak quarter. The market began repricing the whole chain of bets built around a scenario in which OpenAI grows almost without setbacks, quickly monetizes demand for its models and turns that growth into a guaranteed stream of orders for clouds, chips and infrastructure contractors. When a crack appears in that story, the repricing instantly runs through the entire connected ecosystem.

• Oracle lost 7.7% after the market remembered its massive compute bet on OpenAI
• CoreWeave fell 7.4% amid its dependence on infrastructure contracts with OpenAI
• SoftBank dropped almost 10% in Tokyo, given its commitment to invest about $60 billion in OpenAI
• Nvidia, Broadcom, AMD and Arm fell 2–6%, because their AI demand is also tied to the pace of the ecosystem's expansion

"This is top-grade clickbait," an

OpenAI representative said of the WSJ article.

The problem for the company is that such remarks do not answer investors' main question. Nobody disputes that OpenAI's business is large, fast-growing and still one of the strongest in the industry. The dispute is about something else: can this growth support tens and hundreds of billions of dollars in contractual commitments if competitors are already eating into its share, while its own CFO warns about financing risks and about the company possibly not being ready for a public offering.

The price of ambition

The key figure now is about $600 billion in compute infrastructure commitments through 2030. The company previously estimated its needs even higher, but even after the revision the bar remains extreme. That money has to be paid back with revenue, not promises.

According to the report, CFO Sarah Friar warned colleagues that if growth does not accelerate, OpenAI may face difficulties financing future compute agreements. Another painful point was raised there as well: the organization may not be ready for an IPO in the fourth quarter of 2026.

Still, OpenAI has defenses. The enterprise business already generates more than 40% of its revenue, the number of paying business users has grown to 9 million, and the advertising business, launched in February, passed $100 million in annual revenue within six weeks. The company also has 50 million paying subscribers.

In other words, the problem is not that OpenAI is weak. The problem is that at its current valuation and with this volume of infrastructure promises, it has to be not merely strong but historically exceptional in growth rate and monetization quality.

What this means

The OpenAI story shows that the AI market is entering a new phase, where loud releases and record funding rounds are no longer enough. Investors are starting to look not only at model quality but at the math of the business: how much scale costs, who is really capturing revenue, and whether infrastructure bets can withstand competition.

For OpenAI, this is the moment to prove not hype leadership but the durability of its economics.