OpenAI Misses Revenue and User Targets as CFO and Altman Clash Over IPO Timeline

--- headline: "OpenAI Misses Revenue and User Targets as CFO and Altman Clash Over IPO Timeline" slug: openai-revenue-miss-cfo-altman-ipo-clash category: business story_number: "01" date: 2026-04-28 ---

# OpenAI Misses Revenue and User Targets as CFO and Altman Clash Over IPO Timeline

The most valuable startup in history is stumbling at the worst possible moment. OpenAI has missed multiple internal revenue and user growth targets in recent months, and a rift between CEO Sam Altman and CFO Sarah Friar over the timing of a blockbuster IPO is threatening to upend the company's carefully choreographed march toward the public markets, according to a Wall Street Journal report published Monday.

The Numbers That Sparked a Crisis

The shortfalls are not trivial. OpenAI failed to hit an internal goal of reaching one billion weekly active users for ChatGPT by the end of 2025, a milestone that would have demonstrated the kind of consumer ubiquity investors expect from a company seeking a valuation north of $300 billion. The company also missed several monthly revenue targets earlier this year as competition intensified on multiple fronts, with Google's Gemini claiming a larger share of consumer AI usage and Anthropic making aggressive inroads in enterprise and coding markets.

Meanwhile, Altman has committed the company to an estimated $600 billion in future spending on data centers and compute infrastructure, a figure that dwarfs the company's projected 2026 revenue of $30 billion. OpenAI expects to burn through roughly $25 billion in cash this year alone, leaving a razor-thin margin between revenue and expenditure that has alarmed its own finance chief.

A Boardroom Divided

At the center of the tension is a fundamental disagreement about readiness. Friar has told colleagues that OpenAI is not prepared to handle the reporting requirements of a public company in 2026 and has expressed concern that revenue may not grow fast enough to cover the company's sprawling compute contracts. Altman, by contrast, has pushed to accelerate the IPO timeline, viewing a public listing as essential for unlocking the capital needed to fund his infrastructure ambitions and providing liquidity for employees holding billions in paper wealth.

The two executives issued a joint statement to Reuters calling the Journal's coverage "ridiculous." They said, "We are totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can." OpenAI separately described its business as "firing on all cylinders" and labeled the report "prime clickbait."

But the damage was already done. SoftBank, OpenAI's largest outside backer, saw its shares tumble nearly 10 percent in Tokyo trading on Monday, one of the conglomerate's worst single-day declines in recent memory. Oracle, which signed a cloud computing deal with OpenAI worth an estimated $300 billion over five years, dropped 7.7 percent in premarket trading. CoreWeave, the AI cloud provider that holds an $11.9 billion infrastructure contract with OpenAI, fell between 3 and 6 percent. Chipmakers Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom each declined 2 to 5 percent, while Arm Holdings slid more than 6 percent.

Why This Matters for the AI Industry

The OpenAI revenue miss is not just a story about one company's growing pains. It strikes at the heart of the most consequential question in technology: whether the hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into AI infrastructure will generate returns commensurate with the investment.

For the past two years, the AI trade has been built on an assumption of near-limitless demand. Hyperscalers, chipmakers, and data center operators have all priced their stocks on the expectation that AI workloads will consume every GPU and every megawatt of power that can be provisioned. OpenAI, as the largest single consumer of AI compute on the planet, has served as the linchpin of that thesis. If OpenAI cannot convert its first-mover advantage into the revenue growth it promised, it raises uncomfortable questions about whether the broader AI capex cycle has overshot.

The competitive dynamics are also shifting faster than many anticipated. Anthropic's Claude has become the preferred tool for many software developers and enterprise customers, while Google's Gemini has leveraged its integration with Search, Android, and Workspace to chip away at ChatGPT's consumer dominance. OpenAI's moat, once considered nearly impregnable, now looks more like a contested shoreline.

What to Watch Next

The coming weeks will be critical. OpenAI's planned IPO, which some reports have pegged for the fourth quarter of 2026, now faces a credibility test. If Friar's concerns about readiness prove well-founded, a delay could cascade through the AI ecosystem, affecting SoftBank's investment thesis, Oracle's cloud strategy, and the broader appetite for AI infrastructure spending. Investors will be watching closely for any revision to OpenAI's $30 billion revenue target for 2026, and whether the company can demonstrate a path to closing the gap between its massive spending commitments and its actual top-line growth. The joint denial from Altman and Friar may have been intended to calm nerves, but the market's swift reaction suggests Wall Street wants receipts, not reassurances.