...and just like that, the massive AI CapEx boom "excess demand" narrative is in doubt...
The Financial Times reports that OpenAI’s annualised revenue is about $20bn less than has been previously signalled, according to financial documents shared with investors, a massive gap likely to damp optimism about the growth of AI demand.
The company has recently told investors its revenues were approaching $50bn on an annualized basis at the end of September, far short of the $70bn reported by the FT and other media outlets late last month based on information that was provided to investors.
The most immediate reaction was in Nasdaq which tumbled over 1%...
The Broad AI basket is getting whacked...
Who could have seen that coming with Token Costs plumbing new lows?
And in the tokenized stock market for OpenAI (PreStocks), things aren't looking great:
How many more of the prior statements are about to be proved false?
It appears that total token usage was not, in fact, growing far faster than the token price is dropping. And no, the Frontier models did not "model" that...
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 8, 2026
Evidence of how leveraged the entire tech sector is to OpenAI & Anthropic: an FT story about OpenAI's revenue's being less than initially reported is spurring a more than 5% drop in Oracle shares, exacerbating losses from Nvidia and AMD to Microsoft https://t.co/8rhQ9dvxXM. https://t.co/ydwuORW6Cj
— Lisa Abramowicz (@lisaabramowicz1) October 8, 2026
The entire shell-game is based on the 'demand'... and if revenues are that big a miss from expectations, there is an even bigger disconnect relative to liabilities...
Guess there was no "excess demand"
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 8, 2026
That's ok, OpenAI only has $1.5 trillion in commitments to... checks circular financing diagram... EVERYONE...
How long before the spins and denials?
What I don’t entirely understand and honestly find pretty hilarious is that the $70B OpenAI ARR figure was released on Dev Day, on September 29 How did we go 9 days without anyone from OpenAI coming out and correcting the figure? For over a week now they’ve let people believe ARR was $20 billion higher than it really is. What does that say about OAI?
— Negligible Capital (@negligible_cap) October 8, 2026
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