Here we go again! OpenAI reportedly told investors that its annualized revenue was approaching $50 billion at the end of September, not the nearly $70 billion widely reported earlier. The gap appears to come from how OpenAI and Anthropic count revenue. Anthropic reportedly includes sales made through cloud partners such as AWS and Google Cloud, while OpenAI does not include comparable partner sales in the same way. Investors apparently tried to adjust OpenAI’s numbers to make them comparable with Anthropic’s accounting. That added roughly $20 billion of estimated partner revenue and helped create the $70 billion headline that quickly spread across the media. So OpenAI did not necessarily miss its own revenue target. Approaching $50 billion is still extraordinary growth. OpenAI ended 2025 above a $20 billion annualized run rate and crossed $40 billion by August, meaning the business has still more than doubled in less than a year. The bigger issue is OpenAI’s spending. The company has committed enormous amounts of capital toward GPUs, data centers, cloud contracts and power. A revenue base that is $20 billion lower than investors believed makes those commitments harder to support and increases OpenAI’s dependence on outside funding. For NVIDIA, Oracle and other AI infrastructure companies, this does not mean compute demand is collapsing. OpenAI is still growing rapidly and needs more infrastructure, but the gap between the revenue it generates and the money it plans to spend is now larger than many investors thought.