OpenAI has reportedly missed its internal targets for the number of active ChatGPT users, as well as multiple revenue goals. Because of this, The Wall Street Journal reports that CFO Sarah Friar has expressed worries about whether the firm can afford the billions of dollars of future compute contracts it has taken on.
The company is banking on explosive growth to fund all these expenses, with Altman and Friar saying in a joint statement toWSJ, “We are totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can and working hard on it together every day.” Many corporate investors felt that it was on the right track, with the startup raising $122 billion in its latest funding round, exceeding it $100 billion target. However, one analyst said that OpenAI could run out of cash by mid-2027 unless it continues bringing in massive amounts of investments, like what we saw recently.
Despite this, Altman has signed deals worth billions of dollars to secure future computing power, including a 4.5-gigawatt contract with Oracle worth $300 billion and a $100 billion alliance that will deliver 10 gigawatts’ worth of Nvidia hardware to data centers.
The market has seemingly panicked about the news of OpenAI’s missed targets, renewing fears that the AI fever among investors could break. Nevertheless, it seems that Altman is pushing to acquire more computing power, arguing that shortages in capacity is what’s limiting the startup’s growth. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei once said in a conference that some companies are pushing for infrastructure investments too far, but OpenAI disagreed. In a memo addressed to its investors, OpenAI said, “In hindsight, that caution looks less like discipline and more like underestimating how fast demand would arrive" — a statement that might now seem overly optimistic.
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