The AI bubble just sprung its first leak. OpenAI, the company everyone assumed was printing money with ChatGPT, is quietly missing its own internal targets for revenue and user growth. And the CFO is worried they might not be able to pay for all those massive data center deals Sam Altman signed.

Let that sink in for a second.

According to The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI missed its goal of hitting one billion weekly active ChatGPT users by the end of last year. They also missed their yearly revenue target after Google's Gemini ate into their market share, and they've been missing monthly revenue targets this year as Anthropic has been eating their lunch in coding and enterprise.

Here's the part that should terrify anyone invested in the AI trade: CFO Sarah Friar has been telling other executives she's worried the company won't be able to pay for future computing contracts if revenue doesn't grow fast enough. OpenAI has committed to some $600 billion in future spending on data centers. That's not a typo. Six hundred billion dollars.

They just raised $122 billion in the largest funding round in Silicon Valley history, which sounds great until you realize they expect to burn through that in three years. And some of that funding is conditional.

This is the classic late-stage bubble playbook: spend obscene amounts of money on infrastructure betting that revenue will catch up eventually. Except ChatGPT's growth is slowing, subscribers are defecting, and competitors are multiplying. The board has started questioning Altman's "buy everything" computing strategy, and Friar is pushing back on his aggressive IPO timeline.

Now, OpenAI says they're "totally aligned" and that any talk of division is "ridiculous." CFOs and CEOs always say that right before someone gets pushed out or the company pivots hard.

The Circular Funding Problem