OpenAI's latest investor disclosures reveal its annualized revenue reached nearly $50 billion in September, falling substantially short of earlier market estimates, FT reported.

  • OpenAI informed investors that its annualized revenue reached approximately $50 billion at the end of September, roughly $20 billion below prior market reports. 
  • The lower figure stems from an accounting mismatch after investors tried to align OpenAI’s revenue model with competitor Anthropic’s methodology, which includes third-party cloud partner sales. 
  • The revision highlights shifting expectations around underlying demand for artificial intelligence, a critical benchmark driving massive global infrastructure investments. 

OpenAI’s annualized revenue is about $20 billion lower than previously indicated, financial documents provided to investors reveal, potentially cooling exuberance around the pace of artificial intelligence demand, according to a Financial Times report.

In recent communications with investors, the artificial intelligence research and deployment company said its annualized revenue approached $50 billion at the end of September. The figure falls well short of the $70 billion estimate widely reported late last month based on data initially supplied to investors, the Financial Times reported.

Annualized revenue serves as a primary metric for gauging market adoption across the generative AI sector. Financial analysts closely track the benchmark for both OpenAI and key competitor Anthropic to justify surging public equity valuations and sprawling tech infrastructure expenditures.

Most AI-linked stocks, including Microsoft (MSFT), a key OpenAI investor, Oracle (ORCL), Nvidia (NVDA), Broadcom (AVGO), Intel (INTC), CoreWeave (CRWV), and Cerebras (CBRS), eased on the lower-than-expected annualized revenue.  

The iShares semiconductor ETF (SOXX) and the VanEck semiconductor ETF (SMH) eased between 2% and 3% on Thursday. 

Investor Calculation Discrepancies

OpenAI investors sought to standardize revenue performance against Anthropic, a person familiar with the matter told the Financial Times.

The two AI developers use different accounting methods to calculate annualized performance. Anthropic includes revenue generated from cloud platform distribution partners, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) (AMZN) and Google Cloud (GOOG, GOOGL). Conversely, OpenAI excludes sales made through third-party cloud channels from its core calculations.

Attempts to "gross up" OpenAI's figures to match Anthropic's reporting structure led to initial estimates that OpenAI had reached $40 billion in annualized revenue in August, according to the Financial Times. 

OpenAI declined to comment on the disclosures.

Retail Trader View On OpenAI

Retail sentiment on Stocktwits related to OpenAI was ‘neutral’ with ‘normal’ message volumes. 

One user highlighted the effect of the lower annualized revenue on the wider tech space. 

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