OpenAI Seeks $30 Billion as Revised Revenue Figures Rattle Chip Stocks

Revised revenue figures rattle markets

OpenAI's annualized revenue rate stood at roughly $50 billion at the end of September, according to the Financial Times. The previously reported figure of nearly $70 billion was based on a calculation designed to make OpenAI's revenue more comparable to Anthropic's, Axios reports. The gap comes down to how each company books partner sales, an accounting question rather than a sign of collapsing growth.

Anthropic records the full customer payment when selling through cloud partners and then logs the cloud provider's cut as an expense. OpenAI only counts its own share as revenue for certain partner deals. Both methods comply with US GAAP standards, according to Axios. The difference depends on each company's role in the transaction, meaning who controls the customer relationship and who is responsible for delivering the product.

After the Financial Times report landed, tech stocks took a hit, with chip stocks dropping several percent. The selloff shows how jittery the market has become and how tightly it tracks the two biggest US AI companies. That nervousness may also help explain why Anthropic is moving cautiously on its IPO and why OpenAI has already pushed its own public offering to next year. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently blamed the delay on safety risks, but the postponement was already in the works well before the cybersecurity incidents of recent months. Back in April, reports surfaced that OpenAI had missed its internal growth targets.

Funding push and growth targets

Separately, OpenAI expects to hit an annualized revenue rate of at least $70 billion by the end of 2026, according to Bloomberg. The company shared the figures during talks about a new funding round. The main driver is its expanding enterprise business, with overall annualized revenue growing 77 percent in the third quarter and enterprise revenue jumping 107 percent, CNBC reports.

OpenAI is negotiating at least $30 billion in new capital at a target pre-money valuation of $1.4 trillion. In March, OpenAI raised up to $122 billion at a post-money valuation of $852 billion.

Usage numbers and competition

ChatGPT now reaches 1.2 billion people every week, OpenAI says. At DevDay, the company shared updated usage numbers: more than 1.2 billion weekly ChatGPT users, over 35 million weekly ChatGPT Work and Codex users, and 2.5 million businesses on OpenAI products.

Growth is driven by enterprise sales and an aggressive price war against Claude and Chinese models, a strategy the company doubled down on with the just launched GPT-6.1-Sol. The Codex coding assistant is also growing fast, riding the popularity of the GPT-6 model family. Anthropic's annualized rate reportedly passed $65 billion in July and may now match or exceed OpenAI's. Anthropic is preparing an IPO as early as November.

The big question is whether revenue can grow fast enough to cover the massive data center bills. That will likely hinge on measurable productivity gains that companies can actually point to.

Sources: The Decoder