OpenAI’s annualised revenue was about $50 billion at the end of September, not the $68 billion that had been widely reported, according to reports on 8 October that sent Nvidia, Oracle and CoreWeave shares lower.
OpenAI is on track for annualised revenue of roughly $50 billion, according to a report on 8 October 2026 that cited people familiar with the matter and an investor presentation seen by the Financial Times. The figure is below the $68 billion that was widely reported late in September, and the news hit shares of companies that supply the computing power for AI, including Nvidia, Oracle and CoreWeave, according to CNBC.
The difference between the two numbers comes from how revenue is counted. The $68 billion figure included gross revenue from OpenAI’s partner companies, according to summaries of the coverage, a method that investors had used to put OpenAI on equal footing with its rival Anthropic. The $50 billion figure is OpenAI’s own annualised run rate at the end of September, and the company then corrected the earlier number, according to a Yahoo Finance headline.
OpenAI’s presentation also gave growth rates. It said that its total run rate grew 77% in the third quarter and that its enterprise business grew 107%, and it told investors it expects annualised revenue of $70 billion or more by the end of the year, according to the search summaries. A run rate takes one period’s revenue and multiplies it to a yearly figure, so it is a projection and not revenue that has been booked.
The market reaction showed how much of the AI trade depends on OpenAI. A market commentary summarised in search results asks: if a major AI customer earns less than thought, can it pay for all the computing power that it has ordered? That question matters for companies that have signed large contracts with OpenAI or built data centres for it, which is why the shares of Oracle, CoreWeave and Nvidia fell.
The sources reviewed do not give details of any stock market plans.
The sell-off in AI-related stocks did not end with that report. On 14 October the S&P 500 fell 1.1% and the Nasdaq 1.9% after a hot inflation report, with AI stocks the heaviest weights on the market, according to Yahoo Finance, as Delima News reports in its coverage of Wall Street. The two events are separate, but both hit the same group of shares.
The revenue number is also relevant to OpenAI’s product plans. At DevDay on 29 September the company said that ChatGPT had 1.2 billion weekly users and 2.5 million business customers and launched a $500-a-month plan, as a separate Delima News article describes. A user base of that size and a revenue of about $50 billion mean roughly $42 a year per weekly user on average, which is Delima News’ own arithmetic and does not take account of the company’s business revenue.
The caution for readers is that private company figures are hard to verify, and different outlets can use different definitions. The sources reviewed rely on documents shown to investors and on unnamed people, so they should be treated as reports and not as audited results.
The next data points will be the company’s year-end figure, if it discloses it, and the earnings of the companies that sell it computing, which will show whether the orders are on track.
Image: A smartphone showing ChatGPT (file photo). Photo: Jernej Furman from Slovenia / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
