AI businesses have suffered a $180bn (£133bn) sell-off on fears that ChatGPT is proving less popular than hoped.
Shares in companies including Nvidia, SoftBank and Oracle, whose success is seen as being partly tied to ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, fell on Tuesday after reports that OpenAI had failed to hit its growth targets.
ChatGPT missed an internal goal of reaching one billion weekly users by the end of 2025, according to the Wall Street Journal, and fell short of its revenue goals.
The results led Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s chief financial officer, to fret that the company may not be able to pay for the hundreds of billions of dollars of computing contracts the company has signed.
OpenAI, valued at $852bn, has led the AI revolution but has recently faced fierce competition from rivals Anthropic and Google, as well as questions about wider consumer appetite for chatbots.
A number of major tech companies have invested in OpenAI or have valuable contracts with it, and the report sent shares in many of them falling on Tuesday.
SoftBank, the Japanese tech giant that has a 13pc stake in OpenAI, fell by 10pc on Tuesday.
Oracle, the data centre company that has a $300bn deal to provide AI infrastructure to the company, was down 5.5pc in pre-market trading in the US, while rival company CoreWeave was down 5.6pc.
Chip companies AMD and Nvidia, whose semiconductors are used to run ChatGPT, fell, while Microsoft, a major OpenAI investor, also dipped.
The six companies between them stand to lose around $180bn in market value based on the declines.
OpenAI is believed to be targeting a US flotation by the end of the year, but that plan has been thrown into doubt by concerns that its revenue growth will be unable to match its heavy spending.
The company has shut down expensive projects – such as its Sora video generation app – to save funds and turned to advertising to boost sales.
Sam Altman, its chief executive, and Ms Friar have reportedly clashed over the company’s spending plans, but the pair told the Wall Street Journal that any suggestions they were at odds were “ridiculous”.
“We are totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can and working hard on it together every day,” they added.
Richard Windsor, a technology analyst, said that OpenAI would probably be able to pare back spending on AI computing infrastructure if demand proved to be less than hoped, but that slower growth could hold back the company’s planned public listing.
This week, OpenAI is defending itself in a court case against Elon Musk, who co-founded the company but has since launched his own AI business. He claims he was deceived into investing in the company and is seeking to have Mr Altman ousted as chief executive.
