Oracle, Nvidia and other buzzy tech stocks fall as the 'OpenAI complex' comes under pressure

By Steve Goldstein and Britney Nguyen

A Wall Street Journal report indicates that the ChatGPT maker missed financial targets

Oracle's Larry Ellison, SoftBank's CEO Masayoshi Son and OpenAI's Sam Altman at the White House in January 2025.

Shares of companies in the OpenAI universe are slipping Tuesday morning as investors assess the implications of potential financial troubles for the ChatGPT creator.

Artificial-intelligence companies have become increasingly linked through intricate financing, hardware and cloud-computing arrangements. OpenAI is arguably at the center of this web, which is why investors seem jittery in the wake of a Wall Street Journal report that the company missed several monthly revenue targets earlier this year.

An OpenAI representative pushed back on the Journal report, saying the story didn't cite specific targets.

"The business is firing on all cylinders," the spokesperson told MarketWatch, adding that strength in the consumer business is starting to materialize in the form of advertising revenue. The enterprise business is "in the best place it has ever been" due to its recent updated deal with Microsoft (MSFT), which allows it to offer products to customers of other cloud providers, and from the success of its Codex offering, the statement added.

"The moves we made (and got criticized for) to lock up massive supply [have] been proven right and [have] given us the ability to deliver a better product experience to our customers," the spokesperson said, referring to its strategy in compute.

Shares of Arm Holdings (ARM) are down about 7% after the market open on Tuesday, while shares of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Broadcom (AVGO), which both have multiyear compute agreements with the AI startup, are both down about 3.5%. CoreWeave's stock (CRWV) is off about 4%, and Nvidia's (NVDA) stock is down 2%.

Oracle's stock (ORCL) is down about 3%. The company has been spending heavily and taking on debt to build out data-center capacity that would support its large, multiyear cloud agreement with OpenAI.

Microsoft, the largest shareholder in OpenAI, on Monday scaled back that partnership. Microsoft shares were up fractionally early Tuesday.

SoftBank Group (JP:9434) is one of the companies that the hedge fund Coatue put in the "OpenAI complex," which also includes Nvidia, Oracle, AMD, Microsoft and CoreWeave due to their business relationships with the AI startup.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the ChatGPT maker had fallen short of reaching 1 billion weekly active users for the chatbot by the end of last year. The company also missed its target for yearly ChatGPT revenue last year, the report said, citing unnamed people described as familiar with the matter.

The report said Google's Gemini had eaten into OpenAI's market share while Anthropic had gained ground in coding and enterprise markets. The missed targets are reportedly raising concerns among company leaders about OpenAI's heavy spending as it looks to grow revenue.

"We believe that recent concerns around OpenAI are overblown with the company having enough capital to fulfill its compute capacity needs over at least the next three years," Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives said in a note to clients.

SoftBank shares tumbled in Tokyo trade on Tuesday, suffering their worst single-day percentage loss in six months. SoftBank's stock closed 9.9% lower in Tokyo and was the worst-performing component among the Nikkei 225 JP:NIK.

SoftBank has an 11% stake in OpenAI and has made separate investments in AI data centers, essentially creating the purest play on OpenAI's success or failure. Last week, Bloomberg reported that SoftBank was seeking a $10 billion loan secured by its OpenAI stake.

"As [OpenAI] inches toward a potential IPO, the company now faces a convergence of risks that could significantly complicate its path to public markets: missed internal targets, intensifying global competition, and a high-stakes lawsuit that could reshape its very structure," said Christophe Barraud, head of discretionary management and research at Lior Global Partners.

The stock-market slump for SoftBank comes after a big share-price decline for microchip designer Arm Holdings (ARM) on Monday.

-Steve Goldstein -Britney Nguyen

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04-28-26 1011ET