NextFin News - U.S. stocks diverged Thursday as the Nasdaq Composite fell 1.25%, its steepest drop in weeks, while the Dow finished slightly higher. A Financial Times report that OpenAI's annualized revenue is about $20 billion lower than previously signaled hit AI-linked stocks. Oil prices also jumped, which revived inflation worries and pressured Treasuries. The result was a clear split between the megacap AI complex and the rest of the market. The Nasdaq slipped further from the record it set Tuesday, while the Dow's modest gain showed investors rotating toward less AI-exposed names.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.10%
The S&P 500 Index fell 0.47%
The Nasdaq Composite declined 1.25%
Stock & Sector Performance
AI suppliers and chipmakers led the declines. Oracle, which has a large compute partnership with OpenAI, fell roughly 5% to 6%. Intel dropped about 6%. Among chip names, Micron fell about 4.3%, AMD about 3.3%, Broadcom about 3.2%, and Taiwan Semiconductor about 3.3% in afternoon trading. Celestica sank around 5.9%, and SpaceX slid about 3.9%. Bitcoin mining stocks also tumbled as bitcoin pulled back during the broader sell-off.
Among the Magnificent Seven, Nvidia fell roughly 2% to 3% as the report weighed on OpenAI's key chip supplier and investment partner. Microsoft, a major OpenAI investor, also eased on the news.
Hot Sectors to Watch
AI infrastructure and semiconductors were the day's most actively traded theme, and the sell-off showed how sensitive the group has become to any hint that AI demand is cooling. Oracle's drop of around 5%, together with declines in Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, and Micron, shows the market is treating OpenAI's revenue trajectory as a proxy for the whole buildout. That is an early rotation signal rather than a confirmed trend reversal. Semiconductors have rallied almost 20% from late-July lows, so a sharp but headline-driven pullback does not by itself break the uptrend. The Dow's slight gain beside a 1.25% Nasdaq decline fits that picture, with investors moving money out of the most crowded AI names without exiting equities broadly.
Major Story of the Day
The Financial Times report on OpenAI was the session's dominant story. OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue was approaching $50 billion at the end of September, well below the roughly $70 billion that media outlets had reported a few weeks earlier. The FT said the gap came largely from how the figure was calculated. A person familiar with the matter said the $70 billion number did not come from OpenAI and likely reflected an effort to compare OpenAI with Anthropic, whose figure includes gross revenue from cloud partners, while OpenAI reports net. The discrepancy therefore does not mean OpenAI lost $20 billion in sales. At $50 billion, though, OpenAI's run rate would sit below Anthropic's reported $65 billion. The news also landed as investors question whether AI revenue can justify the scale of the buildout. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced in September that the company would postpone its IPO until at least next year, citing AI safety concerns.
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