A major revelation: the semi-official OpenAI revenue figures that circulated widely last week contained a massive discrepancy. Earlier reports, including from this publication, stated its annualized revenue had reached $70 billion, but OpenAI's actual annualized recurring revenue (ARR) is closer to $50 billion. The Financial Times disclosed this lower true figure on Thursday, and the news hit investors hard, sending shares of chip companies and AI neocloud providers such as Nvidia, CoreWeave, and Nebius falling sharply.

The causes behind this data fiasco are complex, but the episode serves as a reminder: the market relies too heavily on annualized revenue to judge a company's operating performance. For AI companies, this metric has become a common standard of measurement 鈥?AI firms' revenues are surging, making traditional quarterly reports, which look backward, seem somewhat outdated. But simply multiplying a single month's revenue by 12 to calculate annualized revenue can hardly paint a complete picture of a company's true operating condition. (This is not a new problem; this publication has previously published articles exploring this risk.) We do not have sufficient understanding of whether that one month's business is sustainable, so extrapolating it by multiplying by 12 produces errors. There are also differences in how OpenAI and Anthropic calculate revenue 鈥?particularly whether revenue is net of payments made to cloud providers 鈥?which further amplifies the risk.

Beyond that, companies only occasionally release such estimates through blog posts, with no fixed disclosure schedule. Most of the time, news about annualized revenue comes from communications between companies and investors, which then flow to media reporters. Just like the erroneous $70 billion figure this time, rough calculations by investors and news organizations ultimately produced the error. Once AI companies complete their IPOs, these problems will ease somewhat. This does not mean they will stop publishing annualized revenue estimates 鈥?some listed companies have already begun doing so. But at least by then the market will be able to see audited, real financial statements and judge a company's situation more objectively. For now, apart from a few scattered financial fragments, outsiders remain completely in the dark about their true financial condition.