Shares of artificial-intelligence chipmakers, including Micron and Nvidia, came under pressure on Thursday after a media report raised questions about the revenue run-rate of OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT. The move spread through the broader technology sector and weighed on major U.S. indexes.
The Nasdaq Composite dropped by more than 1% during the session, according to coverage of the trading day. That marked its largest single-day decline since mid-August. The slide was concentrated in companies seen as closely tied to spending on AI infrastructure, which have been among the market's most prominent performers.
The catalyst was a report indicating that OpenAI's annualized revenue is $20 billion lower than the company had previously signaled. Wire coverage described the figure as falling short of what had been anticipated. Investors appeared to read the news as a possible sign that the commercial returns of AI products might be lagging the scale of investment flowing into chips and data centers.
Analysts cited in market coverage pushed back on that interpretation. They said the shortfall stemmed from differences in how annualized revenue is calculated and reported, and not from any deterioration in demand for AI services. One account characterized the reaction in chip shares as reflecting "undue concern," suggesting that the selling went beyond what the underlying facts warranted.
After the cash-session losses, S&P 500 futures were little changed in later trading, based on live market updates. That suggested the turbulence had not immediately extended into a further broad decline in U.S. equity-index futures, even as the technology sector's volatility remained a focus.
The episode illustrates how sensitive AI-related equities have become to any news touching the financial health of OpenAI, whose growth is widely watched as a gauge of demand for the processors and memory products supplied by companies such as Nvidia and Micron. The sources reviewed by FXMARE do not provide further detail on how the revenue figure was derived, nor on company responses, so the precise basis for the discrepancy remains a matter of analyst interpretation.