The Wall Street Journal reported on April 28 that OpenAI has missed its own internal targets for user growth and revenue, including a milestone of one billion weekly active ChatGPT users by year-end and several monthly revenue goals earlier in the year. The shortfall is attributed to Google Gemini gaining share late in 2025 and Anthropic continuing to take coding and enterprise revenue. Oracle — locked into a $300 billion, five-year compute supply contract with OpenAI — fell 4 percent on the news. Broadcom dropped 4 percent, AMD 3 percent, and Nvidia more than 1 percent. OpenAI's response was terse: 'This is ridiculous. We are totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can.'
The story matters less for the specific numbers and more for what it implies about the AI capex cycle. The largest AI infrastructure deals — Oracle-OpenAI, Microsoft-OpenAI, Amazon-Anthropic, Google-Anthropic — were sized against revenue trajectories that assumed something close to uninterrupted exponential growth. If OpenAI is missing those projections by even modest amounts, the discounted cash flow underneath roughly $1 trillion in announced AI infrastructure commitments has to be re-underwritten.
Markets are now pricing two things at once. The first is the genuine question of whether OpenAI's growth has plateaued in a competitive market that finally has credible alternatives. The second is the less-genuine question of whether one quarter of softer-than-internal-target results means the broader buildout is overbuilt. The honest answer to both is 'we will know in two earnings cycles' — Microsoft and Alphabet report next week, and their Azure-OpenAI and Google Cloud commentaries will move the same stocks again.
Takeaway for learners: AI economics now run through a small number of public companies whose disclosures are becoming the most reliable window into private-lab health. If you want to track whether the AI investment cycle is on or off the rails, the data isn't on Twitter — it's in the cloud-segment line items of MSFT, GOOGL, AMZN, ORCL and the GPU revenue lines of NVDA and AMD.