What the documents say
OpenAI told investors its annualised revenue was approximately $50bn at the end of September, the Financial Times reported on Thursday from financial documents it had reviewed. That is about $20bn below the figure that circulated widely in late September, when several outlets put the company’s run rate close to $70bn.
Nothing in the reporting suggests OpenAI lost sales between the two numbers. The gap is an accounting one. A person familiar with the matter told CNBC that the $68bn version included the gross revenue of OpenAI’s partners, a basis investors had adopted so they could compare the company directly with Anthropic, which counts sales made through cloud partners such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. OpenAI does not count that partner revenue in its own figure.
The growth rates OpenAI did give
The same investor update put third-quarter run-rate growth at 77% overall and 107% for the enterprise business, according to a person familiar with it. Those are the company’s own figures about its own performance, and neither has been independently audited.
Bloomberg reported on Friday that OpenAI expects to reach or exceed $70bn in annualised revenue by the end of 2026, driven largely by enterprise growth. That is a forecast given to investors, not a result.
Why a definitional change moved the market
Annualised revenue is not revenue. It is a projection built by taking a short period — often a single month — and multiplying it out across a year. It moves fast in both directions and it is not a figure anyone has to file.
The AI infrastructure trade is nevertheless priced off it. Nvidia, Oracle and CoreWeave all sell, directly or indirectly, into OpenAI’s build-out, and a smaller base changes the arithmetic on how much compute that build-out can eventually pay for. The Nasdaq Composite closed Thursday down 1.25% at 27,193.34 and the S&P 500 fell 0.47% to 7,765.36. CoreWeave dropped close to 8%, Oracle around 5 to 6%, Intel and Super Micro Computer about 5% each, AMD and Broadcom about 4%, and Nvidia close to 3%.
The financing backdrop
OpenAI closed a $122bn fundraising in March and is in early talks to raise roughly $30bn more, with terms not finalised, CNBC reported. It filed draft IPO documents confidentially in June.
A company raising on that scale is valued on a forward view of demand, and the run rate is the number investors use as the starting point for that view. Which is why a revision that reflects no change in trading at all was still enough to mark down an entire sector for a session.
What to watch
Whether OpenAI starts publishing a defined revenue measure of its own, rather than leaving investors to reconstruct one. If the company is heading for a listing, it will have to. Until then every comparison between OpenAI and Anthropic is a comparison between two different definitions, and the next $20bn correction will be an accounting event too.
