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One report from The Wall Street Journal wiped out billions in the AI companies’ stocks.
On Monday night, the Wall Street Journal dropped a report that hit the AI trade like a brick. According to the paper, OpenAI missed internal targets for both weekly users and revenue, raising concerns among leaders about funding massive new data center spending. The company also failed to hit its own goal of reaching one billion weekly active ChatGPT users by the end of 2025.
The market reaction on Tuesday was brutal. Oracle dropped about 7.5% in premarket trading, while chipmakers Nvidia, Broadcom, and AMD declined between 2% and 5%. CoreWeave fell roughly 7%. Over in Tokyo, SoftBank, which is one of OpenAI’s biggest backers, sank almost 10%, its worst single-day drop in months.
This was the AI trade flinching for the first time in a serious way.
To understand why Oracle bled more than the chipmakers, you have to understand the bet they made.
Last September, Oracle and OpenAI announced a five-year cloud deal worth roughly $300 billion. It’s the kind of number that made Larry Ellison briefly the richest man on earth when the news broke. Oracle’s whole AI growth story is essentially built on this one customer (OpenAI) paying its bills on time for five years.
The problem is bigger. Oracle is raising $50 billion through a combination of debt and equity to fund additional data centre capacity, and these investments are being made ahead of OpenAI missing its own targets.
The most damaging part of the WSJ report wasn’t the missed targets. It was what OpenAI’s own finance chief reportedly said behind closed doors.
CFO Sarah Friar privately warned that ballooning compute costs could outpace the money coming in. According to the report, she’s worried OpenAI might not be able to pay for future computing contracts if revenue growth doesn’t pick up fast.
Think about that for a second. The company’s own CFO is reportedly raising flags about whether they can pay their own bills. And those bills aren’t small. OpenAI expects to burn through $25 billion in cash in 2026 against a revenue target of $30 billion, after roughly $13 billion in revenue and $8 billion in losses the previous year.
The math is tight. Very tight.
Here’s the part most people miss in these headlines. OpenAI isn’t just stalling on its own. Rivals are eating into its lead.
ChatGPT’s share of generative AI web traffic dropped from 86.7% a year ago to 64.5% in January 2026, while Google’s Gemini climbed from 5.7% to 21.5% in the same period. Anthropic, meanwhile, has been quietly winning over enterprise customers and pulling ahead in coding tools. These are two of the highest-margin segments in AI.
So OpenAI is in a tough spot. It needs to spend more to keep up. But it’s losing the very market share that justifies the spending.
To be fair, OpenAI didn’t take the report quietly. The company called the report “ridiculous” and said it remains aligned with buying as much compute as possible.
Sam Altman and Sarah Friar issued a joint statement. But here’s the thing — joint statements from a CEO and CFO usually happen when there’s a story going around that they’re not on the same page. The WSJ specifically reported that Friar and other executives are pushing for tighter cost discipline, sometimes clashing with Altman’s spend-it-all approach.
The Bottom Line for Investors
Don’t panic. But don’t ignore this either.
A few things to keep in mind. First, one WSJ report doesn’t kill the AI thesis. OpenAI still generated billions in revenue, raised a record funding round earlier this year, and has the deepest pockets among private AI companies. Of 44 analysts currently covering Oracle, 34 still rate the stock “Buy” or higher, with an average price target of around $243.
Second, this is a wake-up call about customer concentration risk. When one company’s stock drops 7% because one of its customers had a soft quarter, that’s a red flag about how exposed your portfolio might be to a single thread in the AI story.
Third, watch the next earnings cycle closely. If Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, or Amazon signal any pullback in AI capex guidance, this small crack could turn into something much bigger.
For now, the AI trade isn’t broken. But it just got a lot more interesting. And a lot more honest.
