"Can OpenAI Sustain Investment Costs Without Meeting Revenue Targets?"...Concerns Surround the Company

There are growing internal concerns at OpenAI, the developer behind ChatGPT, about whether the company can sustain its massive artificial intelligence (AI) investment costs. This is due to the failure to meet new user and revenue targets.

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According to major foreign media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on April 27 (local time), Sarah Friar, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of OpenAI, recently expressed concerns to other executives that if the company's revenue does not grow quickly enough, it may not be able to pay for future AI data center costs.

It is reported that board members have questioned CEO Sam Altman's commitment to securing additional computing power (computational resources) despite the slowdown in business growth.

CEO Altman is prioritizing maximizing computing power by expanding data center contracts, given the surging demand for AI agents (work assistants). However, OpenAI not only failed to meet this year's revenue targets, but also faces warnings regarding its financial soundness due to the enormous costs of AI investment.

OpenAI did not achieve its internal goal of securing 1 billion weekly active users (WAU) by the end of last year. In addition, while Google's Gemini has eroded market share, OpenAI's annual revenue from ChatGPT fell short of its targets. Furthermore, it has lagged behind Anthropic in both coding tools and enterprise products, resulting in several missed monthly revenue targets so far this year.

In the market, there is speculation that the scale of OpenAI's contracted data centers is so large that, even under optimistic assumptions that internal revenue targets are met, these investment funds could be depleted within the next three years. Some of the investment funds are 'conditional investments' that can only be executed if certain conditions with partners are met, so any disruption to the business could lead to funding issues.

This year, OpenAI has suspended projects such as "Sora," a video generation AI service, to cut costs. To expand its revenue sources, it has launched the coding tool "Codex" app and the AI model "GPT-5.5," but it remains unclear whether these efforts will be able to change the market landscape.

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