Wall Street Journal exposes the内幕 of Sora shutting down: Is the OpenAI bubble about to burst?

On March 24, Sam Altman sent an internal email to employees announcing the shutdown of Sora.

There was no grand farewell, no roadmap, and no “we’ll be back with a better product.” Only one sentence: we’re going to put computing power to more important places.

Then, the Wall Street Journal broke an exclusive big news, exposing the inside story behind Sora being shut down~

Direct cause of Sora’s shutdown and a partner mishap

The direct reason Sora was shut down was that it was too expensive—Sora burned about $1 million per day in compute costs. Peak users were fewer than one million, and then the numbers kept declining; before the shutdown, active users were below 500,000.

Meanwhile, total revenue across the entire product lifecycle was only $2.1 million.

And Disney had already committed $1 billion in partnership investment—not only providing money, but also authorizing Sora to use IP such as Mickey Mouse, Iron Man, and Darth Vader.

No wonder Disney is so excited about Seedance’s development…

OpenAI executives once likened this deal to “the end of the silent film era with sound.”

But Disney learned the news that Sora was going to be shut down less than an hour before the announcement was issued—awkward…

OpenAI loses its technical and strategic edge

At the same time Sora was being shut down, ByteDance’s Seedance was thriving. Independent testing showed that Seedance was ahead across multiple performance metrics, including prompt adherence and multi-scene consistency.

And it wasn’t just that OpenAI lost to the competition in video technology—strategically, it was also being crushed by a rival.

While the entire OpenAI team was still struggling to save Sora, Claude Code was already poaching software engineers and enterprise customers.

OpenAI used to have a special kind of power: whatever it released defined the boundaries of what that industry could become.

The bubble structure behind the biggest private financing in history

In the very same month that Sora was shut down, OpenAI had just completed a funding round.

A size of $110 billion, a valuation of $840 billion—by far the biggest private financing in history, with no comparison.

And the structure of this funding itself also reflects the massive bubble:

• Amazon promised $50 billion, but only $15 billion was cash delivered immediately—the remaining $35 billion came with conditions—according to people familiar with the matter, the conditions may include OpenAI hitting specific AI capability milestones, or completing an IPO by the end of 2026.

• NVIDIA’s $30 billion was mostly a commitment to GPU compute, not cash equity investment—put simply, this money is essentially a “GPU pre-order.”

• SoftBank’s $30 billion was originally planned to be assembled via bridge loans and financing from major financial institutions. To raise the funds, SoftBank has already begun selling existing holdings, including its stake in NVIDIA.

Therefore, as of the end of March, OpenAI’s actual cash received was only $25 billion: $15 billion from Amazon + SoftBank’s first installment of $10 billion.

AI bubble may cause a blow-up in U.S. stocks

At present, SpaceX (merged with XAI), OpenAI, and Anthropic—the three biggest AI giants—are all preparing to IPO this year, and their valuations are all over $1 trillion!

Before the internet changed the world, it first kept Nasdaq investors trapped for more than a decade.

When the AI bubble comes again, trapping investors for another ten or eight years—what’s so unreasonable about that?