OpenAI's revenue came in $20 billion light. Chip stocks paid for it

For most of this year, the market has treated the revenue of the big AI labs as a proxy for something much larger: how much demand there is for AI computing, and therefore how much the companies that build chips, networks and data centers can expect to sell. On Thursday, one of those proxies was revised down, and the stocks built on it moved accordingly.

The PHLX Semiconductor Index fell 3.39% to 12,623.72, and Reuters put the decline in chipmakers at 3.4%. The group had gained more than 80% this year going into the session, which left plenty of room for a pullback once the news landed.

What the Financial Times reported

According to the FT, OpenAI recently told investors that its annualized revenue was approaching $50 billion at the end of September. Late last month, several outlets had reported a figure closer to $70 billion, also based on information shared with OpenAI's investors.

The difference comes down to how revenue is counted. Anthropic includes sales made through cloud partners such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud in its annualized figure, while OpenAI does not, Investing.com reported, citing the FT. The roughly $70 billion number came from investors' attempts to put the two companies on a like-for-like basis. OpenAI has told investors that its revenue grew more than 70% over the period.

So the company did not miss anything it had promised. What changed was the market's working estimate of one of the most closely watched numbers in the AI economy. The FT described annualized revenue as the most important indicator of overall demand for AI, and that demand is what justifies the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on infrastructure.

Where the selling landed

The losses were concentrated in companies whose sales depend most directly on AI build-outs. Closing prices:

• Coherent fell 9.63% to $302.35. The optical-networking company had been down about 5% at midday, according to CNBC, so the selling deepened through the afternoon.
• Lumentum, another photonics supplier, lost 5.62% to $1,048.60.
• Micron Technology dropped 4.79% to $1,035.84. Samsung Electronics' record quarterly profit forecast earlier in the day did not lift memory stocks.
• Broadcom fell 4.35% to $360.14.
• AMD lost 3.9% to $620.68, and Nvidia 2.94% to $230.48.

Broadcom had its own headline. The Wall Street Journal reported that the company is working to arrange more than $50 billion in financing tied to the custom AI chips it is developing with OpenAI, and has held talks with private credit firms including Apollo and Blackstone. The discussions are at an early stage and the size could change. Broadcom and OpenAI have said they plan to deploy 10 gigawatts of custom accelerators, starting in the second half of 2026 and running through 2029.

Rates are part of the same story

Reuters noted another worry in the background: the AI build-out has leaned heavily on debt, and rising interest rates could become a headwind. A day after the Fed's September minutes showed most officials expecting another hike by year-end, Fed Governor Christopher Waller said Thursday he anticipates additional increases if the data come in as expected. The Broadcom financing report is a reminder of how much borrowed money is flowing into AI hardware.

The selling was not limited to chips. CNBC reported that Applied Digital fell nearly 2% at midday even after reporting fiscal first-quarter revenue of nearly $342 million, up 322% from a year earlier, and that data-center power supplier Bloom Energy was down nearly 5% at that point.

The exception: GlobalFoundries

One chipmaker moved the other way. GlobalFoundries rose 2.68% to $49.36 after announcing a five-year, $2 billion agreement to manufacture silicon interposers for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Interposers sit underneath processors and memory chips inside advanced AI packages and let them exchange data at high speed.

The parts will be made at GlobalFoundries' fab in Malta, New York, which the company plans to expand. Once running, it would be the first US-based source of interposers for TSMC's CoWoS packaging technology, with production expected to begin in the first half of 2028. The stock had been up as much as 7% earlier in the session before giving back part of the gain in the broader selloff.

What to watch

Thursday's move was a reaction to a reported figure, not to a change in any company's guidance. The next real test comes when chipmakers and cloud providers report quarterly results and update their spending plans. Until then, the gap between a $50 billion and a $70 billion run rate is likely to stay part of how investors read every AI-related headline.