Shares of companies tied to artificial intelligence infrastructure tumbled Tuesday after a report that OpenAI has fallen short of internal growth expectations, raising fresh questions about whether the pace of spending across the sector is sustainable.
Oracle, which has a $300 billion, five-year partnership to supply computing power to OpenAI for AI operations, dropped more than 6%.
Chipmakers including Nvidia, Broadcom and Advanced Micro Devices declined between roughly 3% and 5%.
Qualcomm pulled back 3.5%. The stock had gotten a slight boost Monday on reports it is working with OpenAI on smartphone chips tied to the firm’s hardware ambitions. Leveraged neocloud stock CoreWeave dropped 7%.
In Asia, SoftBank Group, one of OpenAI’s largest investors, sank about 10%.
The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI has recently missed its own projections for user growth and revenue. The shortfall has sparked internal concern about whether the company can keep pace with the massive financial commitments required to build out data centers and secure long-term computing capacity.
According to the report, finance chief Sarah Friar has warned colleagues that if revenue growth doesn’t accelerate, the company could face difficulty funding future compute agreements.
OpenAI pushed back on the report.
“This is ridiculous. We are totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can and working hard on it together every day,” the company told CNBC.
The company, which kickstarted the AI boom with the launch of its ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, recently closed a record-breaking $122 billion funding round at a post-money valuation of $852 billion.
“You would assume any slowing was known by the investors, right? If not, shame on OAI,” Jordan Klein, TMT sector specialist at Mizuho, said in a note. “How new could update be as the round closed end March when the quarter would have ended. And it’s not even May 1. I highly doubt OAI fundamentals slowed that fast in under 30 days.”
Meanwhile, competition in enterprise AI is intensifying. Anthropic has been gaining traction with corporate customers, while Google’s Gemini models are also picking up momentum as companies increasingly adopt multiple providers.
— CNBC’s Kate Rooney contributed reporting.
