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

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 told other leaders that it may not be able to pay for future computing contracts if revenue does not grow quickly enough, 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........

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