OPENAI'S REVENUE IS $18 BILLION SMALLER THAN EVERYONE THOUGHT

OpenAI told investors it hit roughly $50 billion in annualized revenue at the end of September, lower than the $68 billion figure that got passed around all last month. The Financial Times reported it first and CNBC confirmed it, and then the chip sector got walked outside and dealt with. Nvidia fell 3%, Oracle 6% and CoreWeave 8% intraday Thursday, with AMD down 4%, Broadcom 4%, Intel 5% and Super Micro nearly 5%. The Nasdaq closed down 1.25%. Seven public companies, none of whom were in the room, repriced off one private company's slide deck. That is the AI trade now. The explanation came from an anonymous source, not OpenAI. That person said the $68 billion figure included gross revenue from OpenAI's partners, which made for a tidier comparison against Anthropic, since Anthropic counts sales through cloud partners like AWS and Google Cloud and OpenAI doesn't. So a number nobody will put their name on explains the number that moved billions in market cap. The same deck touted 77% run rate growth in the third quarter and 107% for enterprise, which is enormous, and also exactly what you put on the next slide. OpenAI is still carrying an $852 billion valuation into an expected IPO, plus early talks on a round that could raise around $30 billion. CFO Sarah Friar said last week the company is still "very well capitalized."

Why you should give a shit: Seven public stocks dropped because one private company clarified its own bookkeeping, and nobody outside the room gets to audit that math until the IPO.