OpenAI's Revenue Growth Reportedly Slows As Anthropic Pulls Ahead – Which AI Stocks Could Feel The Ripple Effects?

• Anthropic’s revenue doubled sequentially to $11.6 billion in Q2.
• The divergence highlights how quickly the AI race has shifted, with slower ChatGPT growth and Claude Code’s success putting OpenAI on the back foot.
• A slowdown at OpenAI could have a cascading impact across the market, with several companies such as Oracle and Microsoft heavily reliant on business from the AI giant.

OpenAI may be losing some momentum to Anthropic, and investors in the AI infrastructure trade are watching this closely. 

OpenAI’s revenue rose 18% quarter over quarter to $6.7 billion in the second quarter, while sales at Anthropic doubled, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, signaling a widening gap that could have second-order effects on a range of companies that heavily rely on OpenAI for business.

OpenAI’s operating margin sank further into the red, pushing the company farther away from profitability ahead of a much-anticipated initial public offering, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. 

The results disappointed some shareholders who had hoped the startup would show more progress catching up to rival Anthropic, according to the report. Anthropic’s revenue rose to $11.6 billion in the period, nearly twice as much as OpenAI, and delivered a small operating profit.

OpenAI On Backfoot

The divergence highlights how quickly the AI race has shifted, with slower ChatGPT growth and Claude Code’s success putting OpenAI on the back foot and forcing a business and leadership overhaul.

OpenAI last week replaced Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser after less than a year, following other senior exits including former COO Brad Lightcap and Fidji Simo, once seen as a potential successor to Sam Altman.

On Stocktwits, the retail sentiment was ‘bearish’ for OpenAI and ‘bullish’ for Anthropic. Anthropic is valued at $1.12 trillion, compared to OpenAI’s private market valuation of $882.62 billion, according to data from Nasdaq Private Market.

Both firms are preparing for their IPOs, with Anthropic’s share sale expected next month or in early October.

Firms With Direct OpenAI Revenue Exposure

A slowdown at OpenAI could have a cascading impact across the market, with several companies heavily reliant on business from the AI giant.

OpenAI’s biggest infrastructure suppliers include Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon Web Services, CoreWeave, Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Broadcom. Microsoft remains OpenAI’s primary cloud partner and OpenAI has contracted to purchase an additional $250 billion of Azure services. 

Oracle is developing 4.5GW of additional Stargate data-center capacity for OpenAI under a deal worth more than $300 billion, while AWS has a $38 billion, seven-year agreement to provide cloud compute and hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs.

CoreWeave has secured about $22.4 billion in OpenAI contracts for dedicated AI infrastructure.  

Beyond cloud providers, Nvidia and AMD supply AI accelerators, while Broadcom is developing custom AI accelerators and networking infrastructure for OpenAI.

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