TheChek News Flow

AI giant recently told investors the key figure was approaching $50bn in September, far less than the $70bn that was widely reported

OpenAI’s annualised revenue is about $20bn less than has been previously signalled, according to financial documents shared with investors, a massive gap likely to damp optimism about the growth of AI demand.

The company has recently told investors its revenues were approaching $50bn on an annualised basis at the end of September, far short of the $70bn reported by the FT and other media outlets late last month based on information that was provided to investors.

The metric, along with the equivalent figure for OpenAI rival Anthropic, is the most important indicator of overall demand for AI and underpins vast infrastructure spending and the growth of public equity markets.

According to a person with knowledge of the matter, the discrepancy arose from attempts by OpenAI’s own investors to produce a direct comparison with Anthropic’s annualised revenues. The pair calculate the figure in different ways, with Anthropic including the revenue from sales via cloud partners such as AWS and Google Cloud, while OpenAI does not.

Efforts to “gross up” OpenAI’s annualised revenue led to reports that the group’s annualised revenue had hit $40bn in August. The company has since told investors its revenues have grown more than 70 per cent, leading to the $70bn figure.

OpenAI declined to comment.

Plus, venture dealmaking soars as exits remain stalled

Leading AI model developers are talking about slowing down the pace of innovation, but that is far from the case in another critical field of emerging technology, quantum computing.

Isabelle Bousquette of The WSJ Leadership Institute has an exclusive report today on the new fundraising by Oratomic, a company pushing the boundaries of quantum computing. It raised $475 million, three months after its Series A, the latest sign of growing investor enthusiasm in the nascent technology.

ARCH Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures, General Catalyst and Bezos Expeditions co-led the Series-B round, bringing the company’s total funding raised to date to $775 million, and raising its valuation to $5.4 billion from $1.5 billion.

Isabelle writes that Oratomic, founded in 2025, joins a growing class of multibillion-dollar quantum startups building technology that promise to solve problems far beyond the capabilities of today’s best supercomputers, with applications across pharmaceuticals, materials science and other industries.

The Pasadena, Calif., company is focused on building a large-scale, fault-tolerant, error-corrected quantum computer it says will deliver on the commercial promises of quantum computing. First, however, there remains a great deal of work to be done.

Oratomic CEO and co-founder, Dolev Bluvstein says the company’s approach to error correction is a defining and differentiating factor. Error correction is a process that involves ensuring the components of a quantum system, known as qubits, behave correctly and deliver accurate results.

Bluvstein said the company thinks it can develop a meaningful commercial computer with only 10,000 qubits, far lower than the previous industry consensus of 1 million. Bluvstein said he expects Oratomic’s computer to be ready by 2030.

There are still plenty of technical and engineering hurdles, and that’s where Bluvstein said he’s directing the company’s latest funding.

“We have no idea what the business models are going to be. We have no idea exactly what the applications are going to be but what we do know is that we need to cross this tipping point where we can build a working computer that is cheap and manufacturable,” he said. “That’s when this becomes a real technology.”

After the Series A, Vinod Khosla compared his firm’s investment in Oratomic to its early investment in OpenAI.

Martin Mignot, partner at Index Ventures, agreed the OpenAI comparison is apt.

“We had never made an investment in quantum, and to be honest, a lot of the stuff we saw felt pretty sci-fi and really far from ever going commercial,” he said. But Oratomic’s work, he added, felt “a lot closer to being commercially viable and interesting, especially for our timeline for investments.”

U.S. venture dealmaking hit $515.8 billion through the third quarter of 2026, with AI taking nearly 83% of it, but exits remain stalled, according to a PitchBook NVCA Venture Monitor report. Just 18 companies went public in Q3, most in healthcare, and with OpenAI and Anthropic delaying their listings, the broader market is stalled, the report finds, leaving 992 active unicorns and a backlog of IPOs with no clear path to liquidity.

More broadly, however, the IPO delay creates uncertainty for the rest of tech. The market has waited for the megaIPOs to list, which has kept liquidity constrained, prevented investment in other listings, and slowed the flow of capital back to LPs. More companies have become unicorns this year (179) than have completed an IPO in any year except 2021.

However, the backlog of companies that need to, or should have, gone public in the past few years is more than two full years of IPOs. The market is growing faster than ever, compounding the liquidity problem that even a couple of trillion-dollar companies will not be able to alleviate.

However it added that the expansion is being driven by a small number of economies, with significant parts of the world missing out

The AI investment boom is driving an expansion in global goods trade volumes at a pace last seen during the period of rapid globalization that was ended by the global financial crisis, according to new forecasts released Thursday by the World Trade Organization.

However, that expansion is being driven by a small number of economies, with significant parts of the world missing out, while trade in services is set to grow more slowly than previously expected as a result of the war between the U.S. and Iran.

The Geneva-based body raised its growth forecast for the global trade in goods this year to 3.9% from 1.9%, and lifted its projection for next year to 4.1% from 2.6%. Following growth of 4.2% in 2025, if realized, those projections would leave volumes more than 12% higher in 2027 than they were in 2024.

That is a multi-year rate of expansion last seen in the years before the crisis of 2008 and 2009, and testament to the scale of the U.S.-focused investment boom’s impact on the global economy.

“Since the financial crisis, it has not been very common to grow like this over a three-year period,” said Robert Staiger, the WTO’s chief economist. “AI is very trade intensive, and the AI investment boom is bringing us back to a ratio of trade growth to GDP growth that is closer to what we used to have.”

Trade flows grew rapidly in the 1990s and most of the first decade of this century as tariffs and other barriers were reduced, containerization lowered transport costs, and improvements in communications technology made it possible to locate factories further away from final customers. In those years of rapid globalization, trade flows often grew at double the rate of economic output. Since the financial crisis, the ratio has been around one-to-one.

The AI boom has proved more durable than the WTO had expected, with its previous forecasts for this year and next based on the assumption that the growth of trade in AI-related goods would slow.

“In fact, it’s accelerated,” said Staiger. “That’s a surprise to us.”

In the first six months of 2026, the WTO estimates that AI-related goods accounted for almost half of global trade growth. That heavy reliance on one driver of growth is also reflected in the small number of economies that are seeing trade volumes surge. For 2025, the WTO estimates that the top 10 exporters of AI-enabling goods accounted for 85% of total overseas sales of those products.

Many of those economies are Asian, and the WTO expects exports from the continent to rise by 9% this year and 5.2% next. By contrast, it expects Europe’s exports to fall by 0.1% in 2026 before rebounding by 1.8% in 2027.

The Middle East will face the largest decline in exports this year as the war continues to obstruct key shipping routes. The WTO estimates that overseas sales from the region will tumble by 17.2% before rebounding by 23.3% next year, assuming the conflict does not extend through 2027.

However, the global economy has adjusted to the sudden absence of oil and natural gas from one of the world’s main sources of supply. The WTO said that while exports of crude oil from the Middle East fell by 24% in the first six months of this year, increases in production by countries outside the region limited the decline in global exports to just 6%.

Similarly, while exports of liquefied natural gas from the Middle East fell by 47%, global shipments declined by just 1% as Malaysia, Norway, Angola and others increased output.

The strong rise in global trade flows is all the more remarkable given that last year saw the largest increase in U.S. tariffs for a century. The WTO said that the global economy’s resilience in the face of that and other shocks underlined the value of the rules-based system it oversees, and which is still largely intact.

“Members having stable tariffs allow firms to plan and re-route,” said Staiger. “It’s a very good illustration of the importance of the system holding.”

While trade in goods has flourished despite the war, the WTO lowered its forecast for growth in the trade in services to reflect the disruptions to tourism and transport caused by the conflict. It now expects trade in services to grow by 3.3% in 2026, down from the 4.8% projected in March and the 5.3% recorded in 2025.

“That reflects the fact that services are not as impacted by the AI boom, and they’re quite impacted by the Middle East conflict,” said Staiger.

In contrast to its weak performance in the trade in goods, Europe has proved the most resilient part of the global economy when it comes to services.

“If the forecast is realized, Europe will account for more than half of world services trade growth in 2026,” the WTO said.

DAX:

MDAX:

SDAX: