OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the 2026 Infrastructure Summit of government officials, corporate executives and labor leaders on March 11, 2026 in Washington, DC, US.
Kylie Cooper | reuters
With four technical hyperscalers – Amazon, alphabet, meta And Microsoft – Set to report quarterly earnings after the close, hovering over its results is a company that doesn’t even release its financial information to the public: OpenAI.
The ChatGate maker, now valued at more than $850 billion by private investors, has become a major market mover in the past year as its revenues and heavy spending are increasingly seen as a proxy for the artificial intelligence business.
OpenAI will be in the headlines this week anyway due to a high-profile legal battle between CEO Sam Altman and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The two former friends were among a group of techies who created OpenAI as a nonprofit lab in 2015, and now face off in court after Musk sued Altman and OpenAI in 2024, accusing them of violating the founding agreement.
Before opening arguments began on Tuesday, shares of the companies also included Oracle, NVIDIA, advanced precision instruments And broadcom The Wall Street Journal report revealed that OpenAI Missed Revenue and user growth projections. The report, which OpenAI described as “ridiculous”, also suggested that OpenAI leaders are concerned about the company’s ability to keep pace with its huge financial commitments tied to building data centers.
Then all eyes turned to the earnings report on Wednesday. The four tech giants reporting are among the world’s most valuable businesses and all have a clear connection to OpenAI, whether as an investor, customer, strategic partner, competitor, or some combination of those traits.
Following the Journal’s report on Tuesday, Amazon revealed that OpenAI’s models will be available on its AWS cloud computing service. A day earlier, OpenAI and Microsoft had announced a major change to their partnership, established long before the launch of ChatGPT.
Both Microsoft and Amazon are major investors in OpenAI, with the former investing a total of $13 billion and the latter recently committing to invest $50 billion.
To this point, Amazon has been a close partner with Anthropic, supporting the creator of the cloud through 2023. With Tuesday’s announcement, AWS users have expanded options through its Bedrock service and can also choose from OpenAI’s flagship models.
“We view the launch as a positive for AWS customers who can now access OpenAI and Anthropic Frontier models within the AWS ecosystem and agentic solutions,” KeyBanc analysts wrote in a note to clients advising them to buy the stock.
On Microsoft’s side, analysts at Raymond James wrote Tuesday that investors are concerned “about the company’s reliance on OpenAI on some fronts,” and that “OpenAI is diversifying its calculations away from Microsoft.” Analysts have the equivalent of a buy rating on the stock.
manageable risk
Alphabet is competing directly with OpenAI through its Gemini model and Gemini-powered services. When ChatGPT quickly went viral in late 2022 and early 2023, investors became angry at Google over concerns that search traffic would shift to AI and Google would be left behind.
But the narrative has changed dramatically. Alphabet’s shares have more than doubled in the past year, far outpacing the company’s hyperscaler rivals, as Gemini has taken hold in several sectors and Google’s cloud business has boomed due to surging demand for compute capacity. Meanwhile, Google’s custom-built tensor processing units, or TPUs, are becoming a popular alternative to Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, for AI workflows in the cloud.
Roth analysts laid out their top arguments about Google in a preview note last week. One was specific to OpenAI. Analysts recommending buying the stock wrote, “Is OpenAI a real competitive threat? Yes, but manageable.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg will attend the UFC 326 event at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas on March 7, 2026.
Chris Unger | UFC | getty images
In the meta, perhaps the biggest risk posed by OpenAI is the war for talent.
Altman drew attention to the issue in June, when he said on a podcast that Meta tried to lure OpenAI employees by offering signing bonuses of up to $100 million and even larger annual compensation packages.
“I’ve heard that Meta considers us their biggest competitor,” Altman said.uncappedPodcast, hosted by his brother. “Their current AI efforts haven’t worked as well as they hoped and I respect being aggressive and trying new things.”
Meta’s head of technology Andrew Bosworth responded by saying that OpenAI countered those proposals. He described the hiring environment as “unprecedented in my 20-year career as a technology executive.”
Within AI, Meta was initially competing by creating open-source models and trying to capture developers who did not want to be tied to proprietary offerings. But that approach failed, and Meta recently introduced Muse Spark, the first proprietary model originating from Meta Superintelligence Labs, led by the company’s high-priced Chief AI Officer Alexander Wang.
Early industry tests show positive results for Meta’s technology, but the company has a lot of work to do to prove it can compete with leading model developers.
“While the company has integrated Meta AI into its core apps, we await a strategy to increase consumer usage that is similar to other AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Cloud,” Citizens analysts wrote in an earnings preview last week. “We believe this can unlock new data and advertising budgets.”
Watch: OpenAI dismissed reports that the company missed revenue targets.
