According to OpenAI’s disclosure, the company’s annualized revenue was close to $50 billion as of the end of September, below the $70 billion figure that had been widely circulated in the market.
After the news broke, chip stocks such as Nvidia(NVDA 0.00%↑), Broadcom(AVGO 0.00%↑ ) and Micron(MU 0.00%↑ ) weakened together, and AI infrastructure-related assets were also affected. The market had been focused on how much faster AI revenue could grow. This time, the discussion shifted to how revenue is actually calculated, and whether massive spending on computing power can generate sustained, verifiable commercial returns.
The gap between the estimated $70 billion and the actual $50 billion cannot simply be read as OpenAI doing $20 billion less business. The difference stems from how OpenAI and Anthropic each count revenue from cloud partnerships.
OpenAI does not include all of the sales made by some of its cloud partners in its own revenue, and Anthropic uses a different approach as well.
Reuters also noted that an annualized revenue run rate is usually extrapolated to a full year from the revenue of a given period, and does not equal full-year operating revenue that has actually been realized.
