There’s a pattern emerging across the AI trade, and it isn’t subtle. If your fortunes are tied to OpenAI, the market is treating you like you’re carrying extra weight. The company is burning cash, getting overshadowed by Google’s Gemini 3 $GOOGL ( ▼ 1.08% ), and showing no signs of slowing the losses. That’s spilling onto anyone too closely hitched to its story.
Here’s who’s feeling it:
SoftBank $SFTBY ( ▲ 5.27% ) is getting hammered, dropping 9.9 percent and 10.8 percent in Japan over its last two sessions. It’s basically a public proxy for OpenAI sentiment: the firm is set to own around 11 percent of the company, and valuation jumps at OpenAI have been key drivers of SoftBank’s earnings growth. It also dumped its entire 5.8 billion dollar Nvidia $NVDA stake in October, likely to fund what it owes OpenAI to build that position.
Oracle $ORCL ( ▲ 4.03% ) has been punished twice over because of OpenAI. Investors once loved the idea of a massive cloud backlog. Then they learned a big chunk of that pipeline came from a 300 billion dollar deal with OpenAI, and that’s when the stock topped out. Now, credit default swaps tied to Oracle’s debt are widening as it pours money into infrastructure to support OpenAI, a customer the market sees as much riskier.
Advanced Micro Devices $AMD ( ▲ 3.93% ) finally landed a “tens of billions” AI chip deal in October. The catch: the buyer was OpenAI. Then came word that 50,000 AMD GPUs would be deployed in Oracle data centers next year, pulling AMD even deeper into the OpenAI orbit.
Microsoft $MSFT ( ▲ 1.78% ) has the closest partnership of them all and a much larger equity stake. But with its own highly profitable core business, the OpenAI drag is diluted. Even so, it’s still the second-worst performing hyperscaler this month, trailing only Oracle.