#OpenAI年化营收较报道低200亿 OpenAI revenue far below expectations—can the AI sector keep going?

On October 8, a piece of news dealt a blow to the U.S. stock market’s AI sector.
The Financial Times reported that OpenAI disclosed to investors that its annualized revenue was close to $50 billion as of the end of September, while the figure widely circulated in the market at the end of last month was $70 billion.
The market reaction was direct and brutal: Nvidia fell about 3%, Oracle dropped more than 5.5%, and AMD, Broadcom, and Intel fell between 4% and 6%. Cloud service stocks Nebius and CoreWeave both fell more than 7%, while optical interconnect stock Applied Optoelectronics plunged 13%. The Nasdaq closed down 1.25%, its worst single-day performance since mid-August.

So what exactly is behind this $20 billion?
People familiar with the matter attributed it to differences in accounting standards. Anthropic counts all revenue generated through cloud partners such as AWS and Google Cloud, while OpenAI only counts revenue generated directly by itself, excluding sales through partner channels.
So the real issue is not the numbers, but the narrative.
The core logic supporting this round of AI market gains is: strong demand → high revenue growth → reasonable capital expenditure. The four major tech giants are expected to spend a combined approximately $730 billion in capital expenditure this year, but their direct annual AI revenue is only about $25 billion, equivalent to just 4% of that spending. Goldman Sachs estimates that the giants need approximately $300 billion in annual AI revenue to cover their investments, leaving the current figure an order of magnitude short.
This gap did not emerge today. But when OpenAI—the industry’s most important source of demand—reported actual revenue $20 billion below market expectations, investors naturally asked: if even the leading company cannot meet expectations, what will ultimately absorb those trillion-level infrastructure investments?

However, the other side of the coin should also be considered.
OpenAI’s third-quarter revenue run rate grew 77% year over year, while its enterprise business grew 107%. It is still growing at an extremely rapid pace; it simply did not reach the even faster pace the market had previously imagined. Anthropic expects annualized revenue to exceed $65 billion and is also sprinting toward an IPO. Both lines are moving forward, but the mismatch between their pace and expectations has triggered market panic.

The next direction for the AI sector hinges on two things: first, whether the IPO pricing of OpenAI and Anthropic can hold up; second, whether the giants will proactively cut capital expenditure due to pressure for returns.$ORCL