Gary Marcus warns that OpenAI’s IPO struggles could cascade through the AI supply chain, hitting Nvidia, Oracle, and CoreWeave. With enterprise AI spending already cooling and OpenAI burning $3.7 billion per quarter, the AI researcher sees a credit event risk that nobody has properly priced in.TL;DR
Gary Marcus has spent years warning that the AI industry is building on shaky foundations. Now he sees a specific chain of dominoes: if OpenAI’s IPO underperforms, the fallout will not stop at one company.
“Their values rely to a significant degree on the expectation that OpenAI will have an immense demand for chips and data centres,” Marcus told Business Insider. “They probably have problems if they don’t get public money.”
Marcus’s thesis centres on a simple observation: Nvidia, Oracle, and CoreWeave have all benefited enormously from OpenAI’s compute appetite. OpenAI spent $34 billion last year and is on track to burn roughly $27 billion in 2026, according to its financial disclosures.
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CoreWeave, which recently joined the Nasdaq-100, derives a significant share of its revenue from OpenAI workloads, much of it routed through Microsoft. If OpenAI scales back spending after a weak public debut, the companies supplying its infrastructure would lose a major customer.
OpenAI is already considering sharp price cuts to fend off Anthropic, a move that would push it further from profitability. The company does not expect positive cash flow until 2030.
Marcus has drawn repeated parallels between OpenAI and WeWork, the co-working company whose stock lost 99% of its value before filing for bankruptcy in 2023. “WeWork was valued at a hard-to-comprehend level relative to its fundamental numbers, seemingly more on show than substance,” he wrote.
“I often see OpenAI in the same way, and it has been apparent to me that they had no significant technical moat, and that others would catch up to them, leading to price wars, making profits elusive.” Anthropic’s confidential IPO filing at a $965 billion valuation, higher than OpenAI’s own $852 billion, illustrates the competitive pressure Marcus describes.
Marcus’s warning arrives at a moment when the broader AI spending boom is already showing cracks. Companies including Uber, Meta, and Amazon have begun capping employee AI usage after discovering that heavy token consumption was not translating into measurable returns.
“The death of tokenmaxxing is forcing OpenAI to consider drastically cutting costs,” Marcus said. “That might help with retaining users, but pushes them even further away from profitability.”
OpenAI’s Q1 2026 revenue reached $5.7 billion but came with $3.7 billion in cash burn. The company is simultaneously facing an investigation by 42 state attorneys general and a lawsuit from the state of Florida, adding legal uncertainty to its pre-IPO narrative.
What concerns Marcus most is the systemic risk. If OpenAI’s IPO falters, lenders who have backed AI infrastructure could begin questioning the creditworthiness of the entire asset class.
“Nobody really knows what the blast radius might be, because we don’t know how much of a problem there would be for lenders,” he said. For investors holding Nvidia, Oracle, and CoreWeave, the question is no longer whether OpenAI will go public, but what happens to everything connected to it if the debut disappoints.
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