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OpenAI's revenue missed by $20B: FT says $50B annualized, not $70B — and AI stocks tumbled

OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue neared $50 billion at the end of September — roughly $20 billion below the $70 billion figure media reported last month, according to the Financial Times. The report rattled AI stocks on Thursday, with Nvidia, Oracle and Intel all falling.

MD Marcus Doyle Senior Technology Writer · October 8, 2026 · 4 min read

OpenAI is making about $20 billion a year less than investors had been led to believe. The Financial Times reported on Thursday that the company recently told its financial backers its annualized revenue was approaching $50 billion at the end of September — far short of the $70 billion figure reported by media outlets, including Reuters, late last month. OpenAI declined to comment on the report, and Reuters said it could not independently verify it.

An accounting mismatch

The gap, according to the FT, came from “attempts by OpenAI’s own investors to produce a direct comparison with Anthropic’s annualised revenues.” The two labs count differently: Anthropic includes revenue from sales made via cloud partners such as AWS and Google Cloud, while OpenAI’s number is net revenue and doesn’t. A person familiar with the matter told CNBC that the earlier number — which the network had reported as $68 billion — counted gross revenue from OpenAI’s partnerships with companies like chipmaker Nvidia, a method meant to make the two rivals easier to compare.

Annualized revenue run rate is a familiar, sometimes misleading startup metric: it typically takes one month’s sales and multiplies it by twelve. Investors track it at OpenAI and Anthropic as the clearest signal of demand for AI — the figure that helps justify enormous spending on data centers and the AI-fueled stock rally.

Thursday’s FT report sent AI-linked shares lower: the Nasdaq Composite sank 1.25%, its worst day since mid-August. Image: fxstreet.cz.

Markets feel it

Selling accelerated after the FT report published midday. The Nasdaq Composite sank 1.25%, its worst day since mid-August, and the S&P 500 fell 0.5%, according to CNN. Nvidia fell 2.9%, Intel 5.3% and Oracle 5.5%, with the decline reaching AMD, Broadcom, CoreWeave and Super Micro Computer.

“There are going to be tremors throughout all of the related sub-industries,” Baird investment strategist Ross Mayfield told CNN. The outlook for many tech stocks rests on investors’ conviction that AI demand will keep growing — and any wrinkle in that story ripples through the supply chain for the AI buildout.

OpenAI’s valuation story now faces harder math from its own disclosures. Image: jbiznews.com.

Why it matters now

The report lands as OpenAI negotiates a fresh private fundraising that could value it at roughly $1.4 trillion, the FT reported. The company confidentially submitted paperwork for an initial public offering in June but has since pushed back the listing to early 2027; archrival Anthropic is expected to list next month.

The revenue question has been dogging OpenAI for months. Its leaked 2025 financials earlier this year showed it had made about $13 billion but spent significantly more, according to TechCrunch. For a company that raised $122 billion in a March funding round alone and is asking investors to fund a data-center buildout measured in trillions, the difference between $50 billion and $70 billion is the difference between a story that holds and one that starts to crack.