OpenAI Misses Revenue, User Targets As CFO Fears $1.5 Trillion In Commitments Can’t Be Paid
April 28th, 2026Via: ZeroHedge:
Earlier today, when previewing this week’s earnings by the Mag 7 which account for over $10 trillion in market cap set to report Q1 results after the close on Wednesday, Goldman’s Delta-One head Rich Privorotsky said that “Equities are being driven by one thing…AI spend”, and warned that “it’s hard not to respect the strength of the AI bid, but the velocity has been extreme. The upside surprise vs expectations has almost entirely come from AI spend…it’s the whole game.”
Not only is the whole game, it is the one thing that has prevented the market from collapsing into the Iran war’s stagflationary black hole, with “oil/product prices is sucking the oxygen out of the room…Europe underperforming, dispersion extreme.”
But none of that matters as long as capex recipients, i.e., chip and semi stocks, keep surging on hopes and expectations that the LLMs and hyperscalers will keep pumping them full of cash day after day, for the unforeseeable future, which they have so far: recall that at the end of Q4, full-year capex estimates soared to a mindblowing $740 billion among just 6 hyperscalers (a number which is expected to rise to almost $1 trillion in 2027).
And at top of this trickle-down monetary waterfall is none other than Sam Altman’s OpenAi, generously peeing money into the overeager mouths of hyperscalers around the globe, having built up staggering purchase commitments to the tune of $1.5 trillion because there will never be enough compute.
Maybe Sam’s right: perhaps there truly is an insatiable need for compute (unless of course one uses Chinese LLMs and/or RAM chips, both of which have a fraction of the hardware demands of the latest and greatest US technology).
The problem arises when one asks if OpenAI will ever be enough revenue to satisfy these astronomic commitments.
More: Did A $1.5 Trillion Pin Just Pop The Entire AI Bubble?
