OpenAI's once-unstoppable growth spurt may be showing signs of strain just as its bills for AI firepower come due. The company has fallen short of internal goals for both users and revenue, raising worries at the top about how it will fund enormous long-term data-center commitments, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing people familiar with internal discussions. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar has privately warned colleagues that OpenAI could struggle to cover future computing contracts if revenue doesn't accelerate, the sources say. Board members have also begun pressing CEO Sam Altman over his push to lock in even more capacity despite the slowdown.
Altman's "buy all the compute you can" strategy helped drive a spree of deals that left OpenAI with roughly $600 billion in future spending commitments and tightly linked the fortunes of chipmakers and cloud providers to its own, the Journal reports. That approach was backed by Friar and the board when ChatGPT looked unstoppable, but user growth cooled late last year. OpenAI missed an internal goal of 1 billion weekly active users for ChatGPT and fell short of its annual revenue target as Google's Gemini surged, while Anthropic gained ground in coding and enterprise tools, the sources say. The company has also battled higher-than-hoped churn among paid subscribers.
Friar has also urged caution on Altman's preferred fast track to an IPO, arguing OpenAI still needs stronger internal controls before going public, according to the Journal's sources. Shares of chipmakers and other companies in the AI industry dropped after the Journal's report on Tuesday. The company, however, insists there's no internal rift. "The business is firing on all cylinders and the mood internally is incredibly positive," OpenAI said in a statement.
- "This is ridiculous," Altman and Friar said in a joint statement to CNBC. "We are totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can and working hard on it together every day."
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