Shares of companies tied to artificial intelligence infrastructure fell 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 3%.
Chipmakers including Nvidia, Broadcom and Advanced Micro Devices declined between roughly 3% and 4%.
Qualcomm initially pulled back more than 3% Tuesday but bounced back into the green in afternoon trading. 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 more than 4%.
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.
Oracle defended OpenAI’s growth trajectory, saying it’s seeing firsthand how quickly adoption of OpenAI’s technology is accelerating.
“We’re incredibly excited about our partnership with OpenAI and remain focused on building and delivering the capacity they need to support rapidly growing demand,” an Oracle spokesperson said. “OpenAI’s new 5.5 model is a significant step forward, and we expect continued momentum as access to their technology expands across cloud providers.”
Open AI, 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.
Still, some investors questioned whether the report materially changes the broader AI spending outlook.
“I view the article as largely a rehash of what we already knew: OpenAI’s growth seems to have slowed in late-2025 into early-2026 as the business ceded some share to Anthropic and Gemini,” said John Belton, portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds. “There is nothing here that suggests this is an issue for the pace of spending across the sector as a whole; instead, this looks more like confirmation about OpenAI’s recent market share trends.”
Others emphasized how difficult it is to apply traditional metrics to the current AI cycle. Luke Rahbari, CEO of Equity Armor Investments, said shortfalls in revenue targets should be viewed with caution, given how imprecise forecasting remains in a rapidly evolving industry.
“OpenAI missing its revenue targets is, in the grand scheme, a distraction,” said Rahbari. “In the current AI landscape, these projections are largely arbitrary. No major player in this race can accurately forecast their revenue or capital expenditure within a 25% to 50% margin of error.”
— CNBC’s Kate Rooney and Seema Mody contributed reporting.
