OpenAI reportedly tells investors it expects at least $70B in annualized revenue by year end
According to Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the matter, the projection was shared with investors during talks for a new round of $30B or more at a $1.4T pre-money valuation, with Abu Dhabi's MGX among the funds in discussion. Enterprise sales are expected to drive most of the climb from the roughly $50B run rate OpenAI had at the end of September. OpenAI declined to comment. The figure lands a day after reports that the run rate was about $20B below earlier estimates sent the Nasdaq 100 down 1.4% and a chip index down 3.4%. The Financial Times traced the gap to investors applying Anthropic's accounting for cloud resale revenue to OpenAI. Anthropic was at $65B annualized by the end of July, per Bloomberg, and could list as early as November. For founders, the lesson is that run-rate figures from frontier labs are not comparable without knowing how channel revenue is counted, and those numbers now move public chip and cloud stocks.
