(Bloomberg) — A constellation of artificial-intelligence stocks dropped after OpenAI reportedly failed to meet its sales and user targets, rekindling doubts that the hundreds of billions of dollars that big companies are plowing into the technology will deliver sufficient profits anytime soon.
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The report dragged down the stocks of companies that have cut investment and business deals with OpenAI, which helped unleash the stock-market’s AI boom after the release of ChatGPT more than three years ago.
Oracle Corp. and CoreWeave Inc., which have cloud-computing pacts with OpenAI, dropped 4% and 6%, respectively. Chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Nvidia Corp., both of which have ties to the company, also dipped.
The reported miss by OpenAI revived worries that have shadowed the stock market periodically for months as technology giants like Microsoft Corp., Meta Platforms Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc. invest heavily in AI and stocks have rallied on the back of it.
Those investments — as they boosted the revenues of semiconductor, power and data-center companies — have sown fears that tech stocks could come tumbling back down if the spending halts or windfall profits don’t appear.
While those concerns were shunted aside after the Iran war sent stocks sliding, the Nasdaq 100 Index surged back to record highs this month after one it its strongest advances in over a decade. The index dropped about 1.5% Tuesday.
“What we’ve seen in this market is like the maximum reaction,” said Brian Mulberry, chief market strategist at Zacks Investment Management. “We automatically price in the worst case scenario or the best case scenario.”
OpenAI’s Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar has told leaders internally that she is worried the firm might not be able to pay for future computing contracts if revenue doesn’t grow fast enough, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. An OpenAI spokesperson said the company is “firing on all cylinders” and seeing strong growth in demand from enterprise customers and for its nascent advertising business.
The stock price moves on Tuesday weren’t outsized by recent standards. But the report comes ahead of earnings reports from big tech companies like Alphabet, Microsoft., Meta and Amazon.com, all of which will provide an update on AI rollouts.
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“There’s still a fair bit of nervousness around the exposure of the entire chip and data center and software supply chain to the big players,” said JoAnne Feeney, a portfolio manager at Advisors Capital Management. “Any bit of news that comes out is going to make people pause and reassess and wonder at the risks they may not have been considering.”
Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana said OpenAI’s struggles could “have an impact throughout the entire AI infrastructure ecosystem, with Oracle as the most exposed in terms of risk to its financial goals.”
“Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and CoreWeave could also feel some impact if OpenAI decides to pull back its computing needs,” he said.
While OpenAI had an early advantage in the AI business, competition has been fierce, with upstart rivals like Anthropic making major headway and the big companies mounting their own major pushes into it as well. That has aided companies like CoreWeave that aren’t tied just to OpenAI.
OpenAI is “not our only” partner, a CoreWeave spokesperson said in an email, adding that the company’s business is supported by other customers like Meta, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google and Perplexity AI.
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OpenAI, once at the forefront of the artificial intelligence frenzy, fell short of several monthly sales targets in 2026 after rival Anthropic gained ground in the coding and enterprise markets, the Journal reported Monday, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter.
Perceptions about OpenAI’s leadership shifted last fall after Alphabet’s Gemini AI model and Anthropic’s Claude received broad acclaim. These updates from consumer and business-focused rivals have sparked repeated selloffs in companies considered proxies for OpenAI.
“OpenAI’s growth has been phenomenal since the release of ChatGPT but competitors are stealing a march from both sides,” said Anna Macdonald, investment strategy director at Hargreaves Lansdown.
–With assistance from Seth Fiegerman, Dana Wollman, Lynn Doan and Ruhell Amin.
(Updates trading, adds investor comments, OpenAI comment in seventh paragraph.)
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