Wednesday, April 29, 2026

OpenAI is ‘strongly positioned,’ says Wedbush’s Dan Ives

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Good morning. OpenAI is planning to spend as much as $600 billion on compute by 2030. Now, questions are emerging about whether its revenue can keep up.

OpenAI reportedly missed its internal target of 1 billion weekly active users for ChatGPT by the end of 2025. As of February, the company had reached approximately 900 million weekly users, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The company missed multiple monthly revenue targets earlier this year, and CFO Sarah Friar warned colleagues internally of potential challenges in funding future computing contracts, the report said. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Friar called the claims “ridiculous” in a statement to Reuters.

Markets reacted broadly to the report. AI-linked stocks including Oracle, CoreWeave, Nvidia, and AMD fell Tuesday, with the Nasdaq 100 dropping about 1.5%, as investors grew more cautious on the outlook for AI spending following reports tied to OpenAI.

I asked Dan Ives, a managing director at Wedbush Securities, whether he thought the selloff was warranted. “We believe this is an overreaction, as OpenAI is strongly positioned,” he said. “We will take the other side of this bear thesis and be buyers of Oracle and other names impacted today.”

In a Tuesday morning note, Wedbush analysts said they believe OpenAI continues to see very strong demand across both consumer and enterprise segments. “We strongly disagree with the notion that growth is weakening,” the analysts wrote.

Rittenhouse Research said in an X post on Tuesday that the WSJ article didn’t take into account this year’s rollout of GPT-5.5 and the updated Codex model. OpenAI Newsroom replied: “We agree. The real leading indicators are clear: breakout Codex growth, enterprise offerings on every cloud, the only consumer app that matters, a compute strategy built to accelerate, and the best researchers in the world.”

According to February reports, OpenAI projected that its revenue will grow rapidly over the next few years and exceed $280 billion by 2030.

In late March, OpenAI announced it raised $122 billion in a funding round that values the company at $852 billion. “It’s a historic number, but for me, what matters more is what it represents,” Friar wrote in a LinkedIn post following the announcement. “We’re building the core infrastructure for AI, making it possible for anyone, anywhere, to build.”

Friar added that while it’s easy to focus on models and products, compute is the engine behind it all. “With this funding, we can invest at the scale needed to deliver intelligence more efficiently to consumers, enterprises, and builders everywhere,” she said. “That’s the part that keeps me energized—not just what we build, but what others will build on top of it.”

OpenAI, a private company, is expected to pursue an IPO as it navigates intensifying competition from Google Gemini and Anthropic.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

Leaderboard

Fortune 500 Power Moves
Jamie A. Beggs was appointed SVP and CFO of PPG (No. 234), a global supplier of paints and coatings, effective July 6. Beggs is succeeding Vincent J. Morales as CFO, who announced earlier his planned retirement following a 41-year career with PPG. Beggs joins PPG with more than 25 years of experience in financial leadership positions in public and private organizations with a focus on specialty materials and diverse end markets. Since 2020, she has served as CFO of Avient Corporation. Before that, Beggs served as CFO of Hunt Consolidated, Inc. and also worked for 10 years at Celanese Corporation, where she served in a variety of leadership positions, including CFO of its materials solutions business.

Every Friday morning, the weekly Fortune 500 Power Moves column tracks Fortune 500 company C-suite shifts—see the most recent edition.

More notable moves:

Suketu (Suky) Upadhyay was appointed EVP and CFO of Incyte (Nasdaq: INCY), a biopharmaceutical, effective May 4. Upadhyay most recently served as EVP and CFO at Zimmer Biomet. Before that, he held senior finance leadership roles at several major pharmaceutical companies, including SVP of global financial operations at Bristol Myers Squibb and EVP and CFO at Endo International. Upadhyay also served as interim CFO and chief accounting officer at Becton Dickinson.

Sheri Savage, CFO of Ultra Clean Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: UCTT), will be retiring from the company. Savage has worked at Ultra Clean for 17 years in leadership roles including VP of finance, SVP and chief accounting officer, and was appointed CFO in 2016. The board has initiated a search for her successor, considering both internal and external candidates.

Big Deal

Higher gasoline prices are stretching household budgets, with the greatest impact on lower-income consumers, according to a Bank of America Institute analysis. In March, the median lower-income household spent about 4.2% of its income on gasoline (up from 3.9% a year earlier and above 2019 levels), while higher-income households spent 2.7%. Both figures remain well below the levels reached in 2022.

Analysts note that current gasoline prices should be viewed in a broader context. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey shows gasoline accounted for as much as 5% of annual consumer expenditures in 2008, 2011 and 2012. Bank of America data for March 2026 shows gasoline's share of income remains well below those historical highs.

Share of annual consumer expenditure on gasoline and other fuels according to the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey (%, yearly) and the average share of gasoline as a percentage of average income in Bank of America customer deposit data (%, March for 2019-2026)

Source: Bank of America internal data, Bureau of Labor Statistics. Courtesy of Bank of America Institute.

Going deeper

Gartner, Inc. predicts that by 2029, CFOs in organizations that implement strategic AI and technology portfolio resource deployment will unlock an additional 10 points of margin growth. “Three quarters of CFOs are raising their tech budgets for 2026, with nearly half by 10% or more, as AI is reshaping core finance, process automation and analytics,” Mike Helsel, senior director analyst in the Gartner Finance practice, said in a statement. “However, CFOs will not unlock margin gains from AI by chasing isolated pilots: the biggest returns will come from managing finance technology as a portfolio—strengthening proven applications, accelerating high-value automation and scaling AI where governance and integration are maturing.”