OpenAI has fallen short of its goals for new users and revenue in recent months, sparking concern among some company leaders over whether it can support its extensive data centre spending, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Chief financial officer Sarah Friar has expressed concerns to other company leaders that the ChatGPT creator might not be able to pay for future computing contracts if revenue doesn’t grow fast enough, according to the report.
OpenAI missed multiple monthly revenue targets earlier this year after losing ground to Anthropic in coding and enterprise markets, the report said.
“This is ridiculous. We are totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can and working hard on it together every day,” CEO and co-founder Sam Altman and Friar said in an e-mailed statement to Reuters in reaction to the Wall Street Journal report (paywall).
ChatGPT’s growth slowed towards the end of last year, the report said, adding that OpenAI fell short of an internal target to reach a billion weekly active users for the artificial intelligence chatbot by year-end.
Read: Anthropic tightens the screws on OpenAI
The company has also grappled with subscriber defections, the report added. — Disha Mishra, with Chandni Shah, (c) 2026 Reuters
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