OpenAI's Run Rate Was $50 Billion, Not the $70 Billion Everyone Repeated, and AI Chip Stocks Took the Hit

A $20 billion gap in one number knocked the AI trade off balance on Thursday. OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue was roughly $50 billion at the end of September, well short of the $68 billion to $70 billion figure that had been widely reported late last month.

The Financial Times broke the news, and CNBC and Bloomberg confirmed it. Within hours, the companies that sell OpenAI its chips and cloud capacity were selling off.

Not lost sales, a different yardstick

The missing $20 billion was never revenue OpenAI lost. The higher figure came from investors adding gross revenue from partners so they could compare OpenAI with Anthropic.

The two labs count differently. Anthropic books revenue from sales made through cloud partners such as AWS and Google Cloud, while OpenAI does not, The Guardian explains. Anthropic reported a $65 billion run rate at the end of July.

A run rate itself is a projection of yearly sales from a shorter period, and not every company measures it the same way. Some analysts argue the metric is flawed to begin with.

The selloff

The market did not wait for the accounting footnotes. The Nasdaq closed down 1.4%. Nvidia fell about 3%, Oracle nearly 6% and CoreWeave nearly 8%. Micron dropped 4.8%, AMD and Broadcom 4% each, Intel 5% and Super Micro nearly 5%.

A chip index sank 3.4%, its worst day since 14 September. Rising oil prices and Treasury yields added to the pressure. Overnight, the hardest hit names edged back up slightly, with Nvidia up 0.5% and Oracle up 0.7%.

Daniel Newman, CEO of Futurum, called the panic a misunderstanding. "The whole OpenAI drama today was people not knowing the difference between gross and net revenue," he wrote on X. "Optics here are very negative but the ramp this year has been considerable. Broader reaction is overblown in my opinion." He thinks a run rate of $70 billion to $90 billion by year end is possible.

OpenAI's reassurance

On Friday, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI expects to reach or exceed $70 billion in annualized revenue by the end of the year, driven by enterprise customers. The same investor deck touted 77% growth in total run rate in the third quarter and 107% growth in enterprise run rate.

The timing matters. OpenAI is in early talks to raise around $30 billion at about a $1.4 trillion valuation, with UAE funds such as MGX among those in discussions. Its last round raised $122 billion in March at $852 billion. Chief financial officer Sarah Friar has said the company is "very well capitalized."

The growth is real, and so are the losses. OpenAI posted a net loss of $38.5 billion in 2025 on $13.07 billion in revenue, according to Benzinga.

Two IPOs, two ways of counting

OpenAI confidentially filed a prospectus in June and is aiming for a 2027 debut. Sam Altman ruled out going public this year, pointing to safety concerns, and said in September that "right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public."

Its rival is moving faster. Anthropic is expected to list as soon as November and is reportedly seeking a $2 trillion valuation. Once both companies are public, investors will see audited numbers instead of run rates assembled from slide decks.

Until then, frontier lab run rates remain the market's main read on real AI demand, the figure that justifies hundreds of billions in infrastructure spending at Nvidia, Oracle and CoreWeave. On Thursday, investors learned that the number has no standard definition, and priced in the difference.

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