Last October, I called OpenAI a possible single point of failure for the broad AI trade, and at least for the moment, that worry is newly shaking markets.
The latest trigger was a report from The Wall Street Journal that said OpenAI has missed key growth targets. The article rocked public markets on Tuesday, punishing stocks associated with AI computing, especially companies with close ties to OpenAI.
Oracle shares closed down 4% on the day, while CoreWeave was off by almost 6%.
The Journal report, which says OpenAI has pulled back on its massive spending commitments made last year, casts doubt on the aggressive leadership of CEO Sam Altman.
Altman is a fan of large numbers. In 2024, he began pitching the idea of building a trillion dollars worth of computing power to serve OpenAI’s customers. Last year, he signed deals with Oracle, Microsoft, Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, and CoreWeave, all multiyear commitments that came to $1.4 trillion dollars. OpenAI doesn’t have $1.4 trillion, though, and there’s no easy path to getting it.
In late October, Altman appeared on a friendly podcast hosted by an OpenAI investor, Brad Gerstner of Altimeter Capital. Gerstner asked how OpenAI intended to fulfill its end of all these deals at once; Altman took exception to the question.
“Brad, if you want to sell your shares, I’ll find you a buyer,” he said.
After Gerstner agreed that there was a long line of equity investors waiting to give their money to OpenAI, Altman said, “Revenue is growing steeply. We are taking a forward bet that it’s going to continue to grow and that not only will ChatGPT keep growing, but we will be able to become one of the important AI clouds, that our consumer device business will be a significant and important thing, that AI that can automate science will create huge value.”
That’s a lot of forward bets, and there are plenty of unanswered questions.
The Journal’s article fills in some of the blanks. Publicly, OpenAI’s announcements of ChatGPT users slowed after last summer. The Journal’s sources said that the company’s internal target was for a billion weekly users by the end of last year. We now know that as of February OpenAI hadn’t hit the goal. That disclosure came with OpenAI’s recent announcement of a historic $122 billion funding round, tripling the start-up’s 2025 haul.
The Journal also suggested that Altman and his colleagues may not be in lockstep when it comes to strategy. OpenAI disputed that notion and said the company was “firing on all cylinders.”
In a statement about the Journal’s article, OpenAI said, “The idea that [CFO] Sarah [Friar] and Sam are not aligned on compute is ludicrous— she just raised $122 billion dollars so that we can continue to lean in on compute.”
OpenAI didn’t respond to questions from Barron’s regarding the Journal article.
This isn’t the first time Altman has faced push back within OpenAI. In 2023, he was briefly unseated as CEO, and the board claimed that he was “not consistently candid in his communications.”
And that wasn’t the first time Altman faced internal pressure, as revealed in discovery during Elon Musk’s ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman. In 2017, cofounders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever objected to Altman’s ascension to CEO, saying, “We haven’t been able to fully trust your judgements throughout this process, because we don’t understand your cost function. We don’t understand why the CEO title is so important to you. Your stated reasons have changed, and it’s hard to really understand what’s driving it.”
But Altman became CEO nonetheless, and he also survived the 2023 board battle. A business slowdown would represent one more test of Altman’s leadership. And this time, the entire market is paying attention.
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