One miss, three diagnoses: demand, power, or Google
A Wall Street Journal report says OpenAI missed both its billion-weekly-active-user and 2025 revenue targets; Jason Calacanis puts it at a $20-30 billion run rate against roughly $600 billion in compute commitments. The table split on the diagnosis. Chamath Palihapitiya argues the miss says nothing about demand — the whole market is power-constrained, which hurts OpenAI and Anthropic most and hands leverage to the hyperscalers. David Sacks points instead at Google, which took meaningful consumer share after putting Gemini at the top of search, and reads the ~$725 billion of 2026 CapEx guidance not as a Cisco-style rerun but as validation: there are no idle dark GPUs. David Friedberg splits the difference with BCG's Rule of Three, noting OpenAI still holds about 900 million weekly users to Claude's sub-100 million.
“Everything in this market is power constrained. The reason that these folks may miss a number or a forecast have nothing to do with demand. It is entirely 100 percent due to the supply of the power necessary to generate the output token.”
“if there is a single reason why OpenAI did not hit its user targets and its revenue targets, certainly around consumer, you'd have to say it's because Google managed to take meaningful share”
“There's no dark GPUs today, as Brad Gerstner likes to say.”