OpenAI approaches revenue of high-tech hyperscaler

Using four technologies hyperscalers — Amazon, alphabet, meta and microsoft — Scheduled to report quarterly results after the market close, the company hovering over those results is OpenAI, a company that doesn’t even release its financials to the public.

The creator of ChatGPT is now valued at more than $850 billion by private investors and has become a major market mover over the past year as its revenues and high spending are increasingly seen as proxies for artificial intelligence trading.

Either way, OpenAI will be in the headlines this week due to its high-profile legal battle with CEO Sam Altman. tesla CEO Elon Musk. The two former friends were among a group of engineers who founded OpenAI as a nonprofit lab in 2015 and are currently facing off in court after Musk sued Altman and OpenAI in 2024, accusing them of violating their founding agreement.

Shares of the following companies rose before opening arguments began on Tuesday. oracle, Nvidia, advanced micro device and broadcom That rating fell after a Wall Street Journal report that OpenAI missed revenue and user growth estimates. The report, which OpenAI characterized as “ridiculous,” also suggested that OpenAI’s leaders were concerned about whether the company would be able to meet the huge financial commitments associated with building the data center.

All eyes then turned to the company’s earnings report scheduled for Wednesday. The four reporting technology giants are among the world’s most valuable companies and have clear ties to OpenAI as investors, customers, strategic partners, competitors, or some combination thereof.

Following Tuesday’s Journal report, Amazon revealed that OpenAI models will be available on its AWS cloud computing service. The day before, OpenAI and Microsoft announced a major change in their partnership, which was established long before the launch of ChatGPT.

Microsoft and Amazon are both major investors in OpenAI, with the former contributing a total of $13 billion and the latter recently pledging $50 billion.

So far, Amazon has been a close partner with Anthropic, supporting Claude’s creators starting in 2023. With Tuesday’s announcement, AWS users now have more choice through the Bedrock service, including OpenAI’s flagship model.

“We believe this launch will be positive for AWS customers as they now have access to OpenAI and Anthropic frontier models within the AWS ecosystem and agent solutions,” KeyBanc analysts who recommend the stock write in a note to clients.

On Microsoft’s side, analysts at Raymond James wrote Tuesday that investors are growing concerned about “the company’s dependence on OpenAI on several fronts” and “OpenAI’s diversification of computing away from Microsoft.” Analysts have given the stock the equivalent rating of “buy”.

manageable threats

Alphabet is directly committed to OpenAI through the Gemini model and a suite of Gemini-powered services. When ChatGPT exploded in late 2022 and early 2023, investors became frustrated with Google over concerns that search traffic would shift to AI and Google would be left behind.

But the story has changed dramatically. Alphabet’s stock has more than doubled in the past year, far outpacing its hyperscaler peers as Gemini catches up in many areas and Google’s cloud business booms with soaring demand for computing power. Meanwhile, Google’s custom-built tensor processing units (TPUs) are becoming a popular alternative to Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) for AI workflows in the cloud.

Ross analysts summarized the main arguments surrounding Google in a preview note last week. One was specific to OpenAI. “Is OpenAI a real competitive threat? Yes, but manageable,” the analysts wrote, recommending the stock to buy.

At Meta, perhaps the biggest risk posed by OpenAI lies in the war for talent.

Altman called attention to the issue in a June podcast, saying Meta had tried to lure OpenAI employees by offering signing bonuses of up to $100 million and even higher annual compensation.

“I’ve heard that Meta considers us their biggest competitor,” Altman said on the podcast “Uncapped,” hosted by his brother. “While their current AI efforts are not working as well as expected, I admire their willingness to continue trying new things.”

Andrew Bosworth, head of technology at Meta, said OpenAI fought these proposals. “The hiring environment was unprecedented in my 20-year career as a technology executive,” he said of the hiring environment.

In the AI ​​space, Meta initially competed by building open source models and attracting developers who didn’t want to be tied to proprietary products. But that approach failed, and Meta recently introduced Muse Spark, the first proprietary model born from the Meta Superintelligence Lab, led by the company’s high-paid AI chief Alexander Wang.

While early industry testing has shown positive results for Meta’s technology, much work is needed to prove that the company can compete with leading model developers.

“While the company is integrating Meta AI into its core app, we are waiting for a strategy to drive consumer adoption at scale, similar to other AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude,” Citizens analysts said in an earnings preview last week. “We believe this will free up new data and advertising budgets.”

Attention: OpenAI denies reports that the company missed revenue targets.