OpenAI ARR of about $50B falls short of unofficial market expectations
The Financial Times reported on October 8 that OpenAI's annualized revenue run rate was about $50 billion at the end of September, well below a market expectation of $68–70 billion, according to commentaries republished by 36Kr, TMTPost and Cyzone. The author argues that this "market expectation" was not company guidance, since OpenAI is not public, but rather an extrapolation from an August figure of $40 billion multiplied by 1.7. The pieces cite the FT as saying OpenAI's revenue definition is stricter than Anthropic's and excludes sales through third-party clouds such as AWS, and that adding these back could put September ARR near $68 billion. The reports also say OpenAI is seeking a new private funding round at a $1.4 trillion valuation and will not list this year. A separate Huxiu analysis notes Nvidia B200 and H200 rental prices fell sharply from May–June 2026, with some tiers down 30%–70%, while TSMC and ASML posted record third-quarter results.
The commentary says the revenue figure triggered a selloff across compute and memory supply chains that erased over $1 trillion in market value and revived AI-bubble warnings.
OpenAI的ARR（年化收入）大幅低于预期，这件事情震动了全球。如果你此前不知道，那么在各国算力产业链公司一波暴跌之后，你肯定知道了。我们先看看到底发生了什么：
10月8日，英国金融时报报道，OpenAI截止9月底的ARR约为500亿美元，大幅低于市场预期的680-700亿美元。这个信息过于骇人听闻，以至于几乎无人关注那篇报道剩余的部分，例如OpenAI正在寻求以1.4万亿美元估值进行下一轮私募融资（也就是说今年不上市了）。
问题在于，“市场预期”到底是从哪里来的？显然不是来源于OpenAI的业绩指引，因为它根本还没上市，谈不上业绩指引。其实，这个“市场预期”根本不是经过精密计算形成的，而是以一种滑稽搞笑、形同儿戏的方式推算出来的：
市场认为，OpenAI今年8月的ARR为400亿美元（注：并未得到公司内部数据的支持）；
#OpenAI#Anthropic#Financial Times#Nvidia#TSMC#ASML#GPT-6 Astra#Sam Altman#36Kr#TMTPost