Daily newsletter · Fri 9 Oct 2026
A report put OpenAI's revenue US$20 billion short, and Oracle fell 5.48%
Oracle fell 5.48% to US$135.69 on Thursday, and Nvidia lost 2.94% to US$230.48. The Financial Times reported that OpenAI told investors its annualised revenue was approaching US$50 billion. Figures widely reported last month put it nearer US$70 billion.
So what is annualised revenue? It is a recent month's sales multiplied by 12, a quick way for a fast-growing company to show its size. The FT put part of the gap down to counting. Anthropic, OpenAI's closest rival, includes sales made through cloud partners such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, and OpenAI does not.
Oracle has the most riding on the answer. OpenAI is one of its largest cloud customers, and Oracle builds data centres for it. Its remaining performance obligations, revenue it has signed up but not yet booked, stood at US$664 billion last quarter.
The Wall Street Journal added to Oracle's day. It reported that Oracle is talking to Apollo and Goldman Sachs about a new way to pay for chips: investors would fund a separate company to buy them, and Oracle would lease them over time.
The selling spread through the chip sector. Intel lost 5.34% to US$107.08, even though it confirmed it is still working on Elon Musk's Terafab chipmaking venture.
whether a US$20 billion gap is just two companies counting differently, or a sign that AI customers are bringing in less than the build-out assumes. I'd want to see OpenAI report on one consistent basis before reading much into a single day.
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