Investing.com -- Shares in AI capex-sensitive companies fell on Tuesday after a Wall Street Journal report revealed that OpenAI has missed key user and revenue targets, fuelling investor concern over the AI spending boom.

Shares in Oracle and CoreWeave Inc (NASDAQ: CRWV) fell 5.1% in premarket trading by 05:48 ET, while AMD dropped 4%. SoftBank Group Corp. (TYO:9984) shares, a major investor in OpenAI, fell as much as 9.9% in Tokyo.

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar has privately warned company leaders that the firm may struggle to fund future computing contracts if revenue doesn’t grow fast enough, the WSJ reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

"[This] raises questions about whether the firm can fulfill its massive infrastructure obligations," Vital Knowledge analyst Adam Crisafulli said in a morning note.

Board directors have also more closely examined the company’s data center deals and questioned CEO Sam Altman’s efforts to secure even more computing power despite the business slowdown.

The spending scrutiny is constraining Altman’s ambitions ahead of a potential IPO by year-end, with Friar and other executives seeking to control costs and instil more financial discipline — at times putting them at odds with their CEO, the report said.

“We are totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can and working hard on it together every day,” Altman and Friar said in a joint statement. They said that any suggestion of internal division or a pullback on computing resources was "ridiculous," the report said.

OpenAI missed an internal goal of reaching one billion weekly active users for ChatGPT by end-2024, and also missed its annual revenue target after Google’s Gemini saw massive growth late last year and ate into its market share, per the report.

The company also lost ground to Anthropic in the coding and enterprise markets earlier this year, missing multiple monthly revenue targets, and has struggled with subscriber defection rates.

Friar has also expressed reservations about the IPO timeline, cautioning that OpenAI is not yet ready to meet the rigorous reporting standards required of a public company, according to WSJ.

OpenAI recently raised $122 billion in its largest-ever funding round but expects to burn through that sum within three years even if it meets its revenue targets, with some of the funding conditional on specific partner agreements.

Companies like Oracle and CoreWeave have been among the many ramping up AI and cloud capital spending substantially in recent years. Oracle earlier this year announced plans to raise $45-50 billion to fund expansion of its cloud infrastructure business, citing contracted demand from customers including OpenAI, Meta, and Nvidia.

Similarly, CoreWeave has guided for capital expenditure of $30-35 billion in 2026, more than double its spending in 2025.