On April 28, The Wall Street Journal revealed that OpenAI has fallen short of its objectives for new user acquisition and revenue generation, triggering concerns among its leadership regarding the company's capacity to sustain the substantial investments in data centers. Earlier, OpenAI failed to achieve its ambition of attaining 1 billion weekly active users for ChatGPT by the end of 2025, and it also missed several monthly revenue benchmarks. The company is grappling with significant user attrition rates, and its market position is being undermined by competitors such as Google's Gemini and Anthropic.

CFO Sarah Friar cautioned that inadequate revenue growth could pose challenges in covering the expenses associated with future computing power contracts. The board of directors has also raised doubts about CEO Sam Altman's approach of expanding data centers amidst decelerating growth. Despite securing $122 billion in funding, OpenAI's data center expenditures have surpassed projections, with infrastructure projects demanding $1.4 trillion over the next eight years and an extra $207 billion in new financing required by 2030.

To tackle these costs, OpenAI is promoting Codex, unveiling the GPT-5.5 model, and trimming non-essential projects.