OpenAI's chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, has warned colleagues the company may not be able to honour future computing contracts if revenue fails to accelerate, according to the Wall Street Journal. The disclosure, based on people familiar with the matter, landed on the same day AI infrastructure stocks sold off across the board, with Oracle, Nvidia, Broadcom and AMD all falling between 3 and 5 per cent.
The report said OpenAI missed multiple monthly revenue targets earlier this year after losing ground to Anthropic in coding and enterprise markets. ChatGPT's user growth also slowed toward the end of 2025, and the company fell short of an internal goal to reach one billion weekly active users by year-end. Subscriber defections compounded the problem.
A spending machine that needs feeding
The numbers put a sharper edge on a company that has committed to spending $600 billion over five years on computing infrastructure. OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round earlier this year at a post-money valuation of $852 billion, the largest private raise in Silicon Valley history. At the time, it reported monthly revenue of $2 billion and full-year 2025 revenue of $13.1 billion. It has not turned a profit.
That valuation rests on the assumption that revenue will keep climbing fast enough to service enormous infrastructure contracts, many of them locked in years ahead of demand. When Friar tells colleagues she is worried about the gap between spending and income, the concern is not abstract. Internal projections suggest OpenAI will burn through more than $200 billion before reaching positive cash flow.
Board scrutiny and executive tension
The Wall Street Journal said board members have begun scrutinising OpenAI's data centre agreements and questioning Sam Altman's push to acquire still more computing power even as growth decelerates. This follows earlier reporting by The Information that Friar had raised doubts about Altman's preferred timeline for an initial public offering, telling executives and board members that the company still lacks the financial infrastructure regulators demand of a listed business.
Altman has pushed for a listing as early as the fourth quarter of this year. Friar, who joined as CFO in May 2024 after running Nextdoor, has argued the company may not be ready on that schedule. The Information reported that Altman had excluded Friar from some conversations about financial planning and that she stopped reporting directly to the CEO last year.
The pair issued a joint statement to Reuters dismissing the Wall Street Journal's findings. "This is ridiculous. We are totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can and working hard on it together every day," they said.
Competitive pressure from all sides
The timing is awkward. Anthropic's valuation is approaching $1 trillion, and the rival is in parallel discussions about a fourth-quarter listing of its own. SpaceX filed a confidential IPO application with the SEC on 1 April. Polymarket odds of OpenAI going public above $1 trillion in 2026 dropped from roughly 59 per cent to around 25 per cent on the day the report landed.
Google's Gemini also claimed a larger share of the market late last year, adding to the competitive squeeze. OpenAI has pointed to some bright spots, including growing adoption of Codex, its coding tool, and strong benchmark performance from GPT-5.5. But these gains have not yet translated into the revenue trajectory the company's spending commitments require.
Related reading
- OpenAI breaks free from Microsoft exclusivity in rewritten partnership deal
- Robinhood Ventures invests $75m in OpenAI
- OpenAI publishes open-source teen safety tools for developers building AI apps
What it means
The core question is whether OpenAI's capital structure can survive a period of slower growth. A company that has locked in $600 billion of future spending on the assumption of rapid, sustained revenue expansion has very little room for the growth curve to flatten. Friar's reported concerns suggest at least one senior leader believes that room is narrowing. If revenue does not reaccelerate, OpenAI faces a choice between scaling back its infrastructure ambitions or going to public markets earlier than it may be ready, carrying financial commitments that would give any prospective investor pause.
The recap
- OpenAI missed internal targets for users and revenue.
- CFO Sarah Friar warned about affording future computing contracts.
- OpenAI failed to reach 1 billion weekly active users.
