The 1 Thing Tech Investors Aren't Ready For -- but OpenAI Just Proved

Last month, the share prices of many leading artificial intelligence (AI) stocks, including Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), AMD, Broadcom, and Taiwan Semiconductor, fell sharply (though just for a couple of days) after a report surfaced that OpenAI had missed some of its revenue and user growth goals.

The reaction wasn't unusual, but it was noteworthy nonetheless. As OpenAI (and rival Anthropic) draw closer to their expected initial public offerings (IPOs), the fate of some AI stocks will be closely tied to what the big AI model makers are doing.

And judging by the recent AI stock sell-off, investors aren't quite ready for it.

Image source: Getty Images.

OpenAI could be the new AI bellwether

Up until now, the AI bellwether that set the tone for the rest of the industry was mainly Nvidia. It makes sense, considering that its semiconductors are the most popular for AI data centers, and companies are investing hundreds of billions of dollars to build new AI infrastructure running Nvidia's GPUs.

Much of the AI stock boom has been fueled by Nvidia and a handful of other large tech companies to date. But Nvidia's share price drop on the OpenAI news suggests the company may soon cede some of its market influence to the companies developing the AI models.

Consider that OpenAI has about 900 million monthly active users and estimates its revenue could be $280 billion by 2028.That's a heck of a lot of users, and those sales will soon rival Nvidia's, which had about $216 billion in revenue in fiscal 2026.

Even with investors not knowing OpenAI's full financial picture before its IPO, investors now see the company as a leading indicator for where AI companies are headed -- which marks a shift away from previous AI bellwether stocks like Nvidia.

What does it mean for AI stock investors?

First, don't panic. Every industry has a company, or several, that have a lot of influence in their industry and whose financial results affect the share prices of other publicly traded companies. Tesla is a good example of this for the electric-vehicle industry and Walmart for the retail market.

But the AI shift matters even more so, I think, because the AI models made by OpenAI and Anthropic are driving most of the AI software innovation.

Most companies that make AI tools are building them on top of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude -- and that will likely be the case for many years to come. Among companies that use AI as a foundational model for their products, Anthropic holds an estimated 40% of LLM models, and OpenAI has 27%, according to Menlo Ventures.

What's more, 35% of U.S. businesses are paying for a ChatGPT subscription, and 31% pay for Claude.

Once OpenAI and Anthropic go public, their sales, user growth, and losses will matter even more to investors buying semiconductor stocks, shares of software companies, and almost every AI-related company.

And while you can't do anything about their influence over short-term moves in the market, you can do one thing: Focus on the basics.

No matter how AI stocks react because of OpenAI and Anthropic, the sales and earnings of AI companies will still matter. Finding growth stocks with the potential to beat their rivals will remain important, and buying and holding shares of a company for the long term will remain a great investment strategy.

That means if you already own Nvidia stock, selling just because OpenAI reportedly didn't meet some internal goals probably doesn't make much sense. Yes, OpenAI and Anthropic could soon have more influence over AI stocks. But that shouldn't cloud your original AI investment thesis.

OpenAI has already proved its influence over investor sentiment, but if investors are going to continue making money from holding tech stocks, they will have to learn to look past some of the market noise created by these AI companies.

Chris Neiger has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, Broadcom, Nvidia, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, Tesla, and Walmart. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.