Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL) was among the hardest-hit stocks in Tuesday’s session after the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI has recently missed its own internal projections for user growth and revenue, with finance chief Sarah Friar reportedly warning leadership that the company could face difficulty paying for future compute agreements if revenue growth does not accelerate materially, a disclosure that cuts directly at the commercial viability of Oracle’s $300 billion, five-year cloud partnership with the ChatGPT maker.
The WSJ report described OpenAI as having fallen short of its internal goal of reaching 1 billion weekly active users by end of 2025, missing multiple monthly revenue targets during the early months of 2026, and losing ground to competitors including Anthropic and Google’s Gemini, with ChatGPT’s share of generative AI web traffic reportedly dropping from 86.7 percent a year earlier to 64.5 percent in January 2026 while Gemini climbed from 5.7 percent to 21.5 percent over the same period.
Oracle’s exposure to this story is unlike most other technology companies, given that the entirety of the $300 billion partnership value depends on OpenAI eventually generating the revenue required to pay for the computing power Oracle is spending billions to provision, with Oracle having taken on significant debt to build new data centres in advance of contract revenue that is not expected to flow meaningfully until next year.
George Noble, a veteran hedge fund manager and former Fidelity fund manager, used the OpenAI report as a prompt to articulate concerns about Oracle’s financial architecture that go beyond the specific customer question, writing on X that Oracle “has been using project financing structures to keep tens of billions more in borrowing off its balance sheet entirely,” arguing that analysts are therefore “UNDERSTATING the actual exposure by a meaningful margin.”
Oracle and CoreWeave, whose shares also fell approximately 5 percent on the day, both responded publicly to the WSJ report by defending OpenAI’s growth trajectory, with Oracle writing on X: “We’re incredibly excited about our partnership with OpenAI and remain focused on building and delivering the capacity they need to support rapidly growing demand,” and CoreWeave offering a statement noting that “OpenAI is a terrific partner, but not our only one,” while listing Meta, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Perplexity as part of its expanding customer base.
OpenAI pushed back directly against the WSJ’s framing, telling CNBC: “This is ridiculous. We are totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can and working hard on it together every day,” a statement that acknowledged the compute relationship without addressing the specific revenue miss allegations that are the core of the market’s concern.
The sector contagion was broad and immediate: Nvidia fell as part of the Magnificent 7’s worst-performing day in several weeks, AMD and Broadcom declined approximately 4 percent each, SoftBank Group sank about 10 percent in Asia given its position as a major OpenAI investor, and GE Vernova fell more than 5 percent despite having no direct OpenAI relationship, illustrating how the market has priced in a generalised AI infrastructure spending boom that a slowdown in OpenAI’s commercial momentum threatens to question.
John Belton, portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds, offered a measured interpretation that contrasted with the market’s sharp reaction, saying: “I view the article as largely a rehash of what we already knew: OpenAI’s growth seems to have slowed in late-2025 into early-2026 as the business ceded some share to Anthropic and Gemini. There is nothing here that suggests this is an issue for the pace of spending across the sector as a whole.”
Jordan Klein of Mizuho’s TMT sector desk echoed that scepticism about the timing of the information, arguing: “You would assume any slowing was known by the investors, right? If not, shame on OAI. How new could update be as the round closed end March when the quarter would have ended.” The $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion valuation closed just weeks ago, making it difficult to argue institutional investors were unaware of any revenue trajectory issues when they committed that capital.
ORCL closed at approximately $217 following the session’s decline, against a pre-report level nearer $228, setting up an interesting dynamic heading into Wednesday’s historic concentration of Magnificent 7 earnings from Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon, whose results will either reinforce or undermine the AI infrastructure spending thesis that the OpenAI report momentarily called into question.
