A sprinter who wins a race but finishes three seconds behind their personal best still wins the race. OpenAI finds itself in a similar position.
The company behind ChatGPT has fallen short of its own targets for revenue growth and new users, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. This shortfall has stirred internal concern at the company, raised questions about its ability to fund massive data center commitments, and sent stocks of its major infrastructure partners tumbling.
Yet the company still carries a post-money valuation of $852 billion, the highest ever assigned to a private startup.
The Case for the $852 Billion Valuation
OpenAI recently closed a record $122 billion funding round in March 2026, at a post-money valuation of $852 billion. Investors in that round included SoftBank, Amazon, Nvidia, Andreessen Horowitz, Microsoft, and others.
As Phronews reported earlier, that single round exceeded the total amount venture capitalists invested in all U.S. startups combined in 2023.
The $852 valuation reflects where investors believe the company is headed and not just where it stands today. ChatGPT still has more than 900 million weekly active users. Enterprise customers account for more than 40% of OpenAI’s revenue and the company recently ended its exclusivity deal with Microsoft, which opened the door for its models to be distributed through Amazon and Google Cloud.
OpenAI’s Codex coding tool has also been gaining users, and its GPT-5.5 model earned top scores across several industry benchmarks after its release.
The Numbers That Fell Short
OpenAI had set an internal goal of reaching one billion weekly active users on ChatGPT by the end of 2025. It missed that mark. The company also fell below its monthly revenue targets on multiple occasions earlier this year and its annual revenue goal slipped out of reach as well.
The competition the AI company has faced so far also played a direct role in this. Google’s Gemini gained a larger slice of the AI market toward the end of 2025, while Anthropic made meaningful advances in the coding and enterprise segments, immediately pulling users and paying customers away from OpenAI.
For the full year 2025, OpenAI reported revenue of $13.1 billion. The company is currently generating $2 billion in revenue each month, which translates to a $24 billion annualized run rate. While the growth may be solid, it is still not on par with the level of money it continues to race with promises of massive profit.
Additionally, shares of Oracle, which holds a $300 billion five-year computing partnership with the company, dropped 4% on the day the report surfaced. Chipmakers Broadcom and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) fell 4% and 3% respectively. SoftBank, one of OpenAI’s largest investors, sank roughly 10%, with Cloud computing firm CoreWeave also dropping more than 5%.
This selloff reflected how deeply tied the broader AI infrastructure sector has become to OpenAI’s growth story and how quickly doubt in one company can move through the entire ecosystem.
OpenAI Is Raising Alarm
OpenAI’s Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar has reportedly warned colleagues that if revenue does not grow faster, the company could struggle to honor its existing contracts for computing power.
OpenAI is party to a $300 billion, five-year agreement with Oracle to supply the computing infrastructure that runs its AI models. It is also committed to the Stargate Project, a joint venture with SoftBank and Oracle targeting up to $500 billion in AI infrastructure investment across the United States by 2029.
Due to these massive investments, Deutsche Bank has projected that OpenAI could accumulate as much as $143 billion in losses between now and profitability, with operating losses in 2028 alone estimated at $74 billion.
What Comes Next
For the $852 valuation to hold, OpenAI needs to win back the users and enterprise customers it has been losing to Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, and it needs to grow revenue fast enough to cover the cost of running its AI infrastructure at scale. But right now, neither of these conditions are fully in place.
The AI company may, however, have a chance with the rumored IPO. Reuters has reported that OpenAI is considering filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as early as the second half of 2026, targeting a public listing in 2027 at a valuation of up to $1 trillion.
A successful IPO would give the company access to fresh capital and force the kind of financial transparency that public markets demand, which would also give observers a clearer picture of whether the growth story holds up under scrutiny.
Aside from the IPO being a chance, it is also a financial obligation as Amazon’s remaining $35 billion, which is the largest single chunk of the recent entire round, is reportedly tied to conditions that include OpenAI completing an IPO or achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) by the end of the year.
For now, the $852 billion figure is backed by investor confidence that the company will eventually dominate the market and grow into that number. The IPO, expected as early as 2027, is where that confidence gets tested in public. If it goes ahead at the reported $1 trillion target, it would be the largest public listing in history and the first time the broader market gets to put its own price on a company that private investors have valued at $852 billion.
