OpenAI's Slowing Growth Triggers Wall Street Data Center Jitters

OpenAI has reportedly missed its own targets for revenue and new users, sparking a sell-off in the data center-linked bond market. 

OpenAI's growth has slowed significantly since late 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. The firm failed to hit its internal ChatGPT revenue goals for 2025, and it has repeatedly fallen short of monthly revenue goals so far this year. The firm also missed its target of 1 billion active weekly users by the end of last year, and it still hasn’t announced that it has achieved that benchmark. 

The slowdown, which company insiders attribute to the success of competing artificial intelligence products from Google and Anthropic, has led to a rift within OpenAI’s executive leadership over the wisdom of continuing the company’s aggressive spending spree on data center capacity, the WSJ reported. 

OpenAI has more than $600B in future spending commitments for AI computing. But Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar has reportedly raised concerns to other OpenAI leaders that the company may not be able to pay for these contracts if the pace of revenue growth doesn’t improve. 

At the same time, board members are reportedly scrutinizing the existing data center deals and pushing for a more cautious, disciplined approach to securing new computing capacity. 

This stands in stark contrast to the aggressive approach preferred by CEO Sam Altman, who has continued to advocate for rapidly scaling up the firm’s AI infrastructure spending, even in the face of a growth slowdown.

The executives are reportedly also split over whether the company should pursue an initial public offering by year’s end, with Friar pushing for a longer timeline.

Altman and Friar pushed back on The Wall Street Journal’s portrayal of a divide among OpenAI’s top leaders in a statement to the publication, calling the characterization “ridiculous.” 

“We are totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can and working hard on it together every day,” they wrote.

Still, the news that one of the major consumers of AI computing capacity might be pulling back from planned spending rattled bond markets tied closely to future data center demand. 

The values of several data center-linked bonds dropped sharply Tuesday, Bloomberg reports. A CoreWeave note issued this month and due in 2031 fell to a record-low valuation at 98.63 cents on the dollar. Recently issued bonds tied to Oracle and Edged Compute also began trading at a discount from their original price. 

This marks a significant disruption in the market for securities tied to hyperscale data center projects or AI-specific cloud providers — bonds that have gone from an obscure niche to a major force in the securitized debt market over the last two years.

The reports of internal debate at OpenAI about its data center spending are just the latest headlines that have raised investor concerns about a potential pullback in data center spending from the AI giant. 

Earlier this month, the company backed out of a deal to lease a data center in Norway intended to be part of Stargate, OpenAI’s global build-out of data centers and other AI infrastructure. A week earlier, OpenAI had announced it was pausing a Stargate project in the UK just six months after unveiling it. 

In March, OpenAI and Oracle confirmed they had canceled plans for an 800-megawatt expansion of the flagship Stargate data center campus in Abilene, Texas, due to financing challenges and changes to OpenAI’s demand forecast.