View / Why OpenAI’s slowdown isn’t as bad as it looks

OpenAI is chaotic, even by Silicon Valley startup standards, so the palace intrigue chronicled by The New Yorkers’ 10,000-word opus is table stakes. What really matters though, as we approach one of the world’s largest IPOs, is how OpenAI is performing.

Slowing revenue growth, which The Information first reported, sounds bad. A CFO with reservations about going public because of that sounds even worse. But maybe we’re looking at these numbers all wrong.

After tripling its revenue last year to $21 billion, OpenAI’s current run rate — at around $25 billion — implies a slowdown to 19% growth in 2026, according to people familiar with the company’s financials who weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

Other projections shared with investors put that number north of $30 billion, or 43% growth, these people said. A little better, but nowhere near the 3x growth investors saw last year as they pushed the company’s valuation up to $852 billion.

So, is OpenAI cooked? Absolutely not. Today’s revenue numbers actually tell us very little about the future prospects of a company where many of its nearly 1 billion users pay nothing to use the service. In other words, it’s futile to slap any real financial projections on a consumer app business in a new category that has yet to define its economics.

Think about the early days of Google or Amazon — there were plenty of investors who doubted the tech startups would ever find their footing. Whole business models — cloud, AI, devices — didn’t exist. A lot of that clarity came only after years of public markets learning to digest brand new growth metrics.

Rather than bringing in sales, the most important thing for OpenAI is to bring in users. If the consumer chatbot morphs into an operating system that connects users’ entire digital lives in one place, OpenAI could compete with Apple and Google to become the next tech giant. It’s a very different business model from Anthropic, which is laser-focused on enterprise businesses who need its employees to use a certain kind of technology.

The real fight among the two rivals is the hunt for compute power. Right now both OpenAI and Anthropic have products so popular they’re essentially sold out. And if you look at compute demand, there’s no indication anything is slowing down. The profit model might look a little fuzzy today, but investors in the most promising tech IPOs are used to taking big leaps of faith.