OpenAI Falls Short of Its Own Revenue Goals With Its IPO in Sight

OpenAI has missed several of its internal revenue and user targets in recent months, according to a Wall Street Journal report published on Tuesday. The shortfall has rattled investors as the company prepares for a potential public listing later this year.

The newspaper, citing people familiar with the matter, said ChatGPT did not hit its internal goal of one billion weekly active users by the end of 2025, and that it has slipped below its monthly revenue targets on several occasions this year. CNBC followed up the report with confirmation that finance chief Sarah Friar has raised concerns about the company's ability to fund its enormous compute commitments if growth continues to soften.

OpenAI publicly pushed back. Sam Altman and Friar reportedly told staff the framing was "ridiculous" and that the company is "totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can." That posture matches the firm's recent disclosures: at the time of its $122 billion funding round, OpenAI reported monthly revenue of around $2 billion and full-year 2025 revenue of $13.1 billion, none of it yet profitable.

Markets reacted quickly. Oracle dropped roughly 4% on Tuesday and CoreWeave fell about 5%, both tied closely to OpenAI's compute pipeline. Polymarket odds that the company would IPO above a $1 trillion valuation this year fell from around 59% before the report to about 25% after it.

Two competitive pressures appear to be biting. Google's Gemini surged late last year and took share at the consumer end. Anthropic, meanwhile, has been pulling ahead in coding and enterprise spend, a trend AI, Claudius covered earlier this week using Ramp's April spending index.

The Journal's reporting does not predict an OpenAI failure. It does, however, sharpen a question that has hung over the AI build-out for a year: can revenue scale fast enough to justify the eye-watering capital spending, and if it cannot, who carries the loss when the music slows?