OpenAI miss forces datacenter rethink

OpenAI missed internal targets for revenue and ChatGPT user growth, raising new doubts about how fast the company can absorb the computing capacity it has been lining up. (reuters.com) Reuters, citing The Wall Street Journal, reported on April 27 that OpenAI fell short of goals for new users and revenue in recent months. The report said Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar warned colleagues that slower growth could make future compute contracts harder to fund. (reuters.com) The Journal report said ChatGPT also missed an internal goal of reaching 1 billion weekly active users by the end of 2025. It said OpenAI missed multiple monthly revenue targets this year after losing ground to Anthropic in coding and enterprise markets. (reuters.com) (ajupress.com) OpenAI and Friar pushed back on the account. In a statement carried by Reuters and CNBC, Sam Altman and Friar said they were “totally aligned” on buying as much compute as possible. (reuters.com) (cnbc.com) The market reaction landed first on the companies tied most directly to OpenAI’s buildout. CNBC reported Oracle fell more than 4% and CoreWeave more than 5% on April 28, while SoftBank dropped about 10% in Asia. (cnbc.com) That sensitivity reflects how much of the current data-center boom is pegged to OpenAI’s appetite for chips, power and cloud leases. Oracle’s five-year computing partnership with OpenAI is worth $300 billion, according to CNBC, and OpenAI has said Stargate aims to invest $500 billion in United States AI infrastructure over four years. (cnbc.com) (openai.com) OpenAI had been expanding that footprint as recently as late 2025. The company said its Oracle partnership would bring Stargate capacity under development to more than 5 gigawatts and put it on a path toward the full 10-gigawatt commitment. (openai.com 1) (openai.com 2) But the company has also been reworking the commercial side of its infrastructure strategy. Reuters reported on April 27 that Microsoft’s license to OpenAI intellectual property is no longer exclusive, allowing OpenAI to sell products across rival clouds including Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. (reuters.com) That change broadens OpenAI’s options for distributing models, but it does not remove the financing question behind the current selloff. If revenue growth slows while compute commitments stay large, suppliers, investors and landlords all have to revisit how much demand they can count on. (cnbc.com) (reuters.com) The immediate question is not whether AI demand disappears. It is whether OpenAI’s actual growth is keeping pace with the scale of contracts signed in its name. (reuters.com) (openai.com)