FT: Yesterday's market fallout shows how influential OpenAI and Anthropic have become, even though both are still private companies.
Oracle and Nvidia fell sharply and the Nasdaq 100 lost 1.4%.
OpenAI counts revenue net of what partners such as Microsoft keep, while Anthropic counts gross sales through cloud partners.
The higher ARR number for OpenAI ($70B.) never came from the company; investors built it by grossing up its figures to match Anthropic’s method.
Both methods are allowed under US GAAP, so the same business can report headline run rates billions of dollars apart.
As per reports, &Y is the auditor of Anthropic while Deloitte is auditing OpenAI.
Oracle is borrowing to build capacity for a $300B, 5-year OpenAI contract worth about 47% of its $638B backlog, and S&P flags OpenAI as a central credit risk.
Microsoft, which owns about 27% of OpenAI, tied 45% of its $625B commercial backlog to the lab in January and booked a $7.58B recapitalisation gain.
Amazon and Nvidia committed $50B and $30B to OpenAI’s March round, while AMD granted it warrants for up to 160M shares vesting as it deploys 6GW.
Much of that capital returns as chip and cloud orders, so softer OpenAI revenue will hit suppliers’ sales and stakes together.
Without audited accounts until OpenAI becomes a public company, it’s run rate is the main outside signal on whether those bills get paid.