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A couple of years ago, 31-year-old charity worker Nicki Wedgwood had ordered Christmas presents online for friends and family. When the packages were delivered to her in Hackney, east London, the driver left them in the lobby of her building rather than taking them directly to her flat. She spotted them as she popped out to a nearby shop and decided to pick them up when she came back. When she returned 10 minutes later, the boxes had been ripped open and their contents were gone.

Wedgwood thinks she passed the thief in the hallway as she was leaving for the shop. “There was some random dude just inside the doorway, who had a Boris bike with him,” she says. She had assumed he was a guest of one of her neighbours. “I said hello to him … I think he even said Merry Christmas.”

Wedgwood and her flatmates have had “so much stuff stolen over the years”, she says. The external door to their block of flats is glass, so thieves can peer in and see packages that have been dropped off in the lobby. She believes there are thieves in her local area who follow delivery drivers on bikes “and immediately push on the door after the driver has driven off. If that’s been left open, they can just get the parcel – and a lot quicker than the person it’s for, who is maybe 15 floors up.”

Parcel theft has become a growing issue, with parcels worth a record-breaking £666.5m reported as stolen across the UK in the last year, according to data obtained by the technology company Quadient, nearly £290m more than in 2024. And those figures are just reported thefts, while many more go unreported. Wedgwood was able to get a refund from the retailer, and says she didn’t see any point in telling the police about the incident, given that when she has reported other crimes to them: “They just take a picture and you never hear anything again.” (A spokesperson for the Metropolitan police advises victims to “always report thefts to the police”, and said it is “carrying out intelligence-led operations to catch the criminal gangs who prey on delivery vans, which has already resulted in a number of arrests”.)

Why has this crime become so common? We know that people are buying more online than ever before but, according to Gary Winter, the vice-president of global strategic initiatives at Quadient, the increase in parcel thefts isn’t just proportional to the rise of online shopping – it’s bigger than that. Winter doesn’t believe that the rise is because people are getting better at reporting it. “I genuinely think it’s becoming more frequent,” he says. “People see it as a low-level crime opportunity and are taking advantage of it.”

Leicestershire is the UK’s hotspot for parcel thefts, according to Quadient’s data (which doesn’t include figures from every British police force, as not all of them responded to the company’s freedom of information request), but city and town centres in general are where the greatest risk is. “It’s more likely that you haven’t got a safe place, that you’re living in an apartment or a multi-occupied building,” says Winter. In peak delivery season – unsurprisingly, parcel thefts are highest in December – piles of parcels can build up in lobbies and on doorsteps, and in busy areas where people don’t necessarily know their neighbours, and thieves can help themselves without too much difficulty.

Darren Walmsley, the vice chair of the National Courier and Despatch Association, thinks part of the reason parcel thefts are becoming so common is a change in the way deliveries are made. In the past, far more deliveries had to be signed for. With a signed-for delivery, he says: “Generally, you’re physically handing it over to someone, and therefore it’s a secure delivery.” In his personal view, it was when Amazon came on the scene that things started to change. It popularised delivering items without requiring proof of delivery, having worked out that it was more cost-efficient to risk having to refund losses than for drivers to take the extra time to get a signature. Then, during the Covid pandemic, contactless delivery became more common.

Independent courier companies that offer a same-day service are “the only guaranteed service there is”, says Walmsley. Multi-job couriers tend to have much less time for each delivery: “They’ll be asked to do 100-plus deliveries a day, whereas a same-day delivery driver might do 10 deliveries a day, so they can afford to take a lot more time. For example, if someone elderly ordered something quite large, the courier would be more able to assist them to get the package inside.”

Overstretched delivery drivers leaving parcels outside, or not closing doors properly as they leave a building, “is a large part of the problem”, says Wedgwood, though she admits she wouldn’t want to do their job. The trouble is that retailers and customers tend to look for the cheapest delivery options, which usually means a lower-quality service. Walmsley advocates opting for same-day delivery when you can. “The perception is that same-day is always significantly more expensive than overnight deliveries,” he says. “However, that’s not always strictly true. The bigger an item or the higher its value, and the closer the collection and delivery locations are to each other, the more cost-effective same-day deliveries become.”

Though the value of Wedgwood’s parcels came to about £100 in total – they contained trinket gifts and books for her family – the most expensive item was only worth £30. “I definitely don’t feel like you’d get a good price for them [in the secondhand market],” she says. What can be sold on more easily, however, is branded sportswear – and Winter’s research has shown that more of these items go missing, suggesting that thieves target parcels with sports brand packaging. “We know that they end up at places like car boot sales,” he says. “They end up on eBay or Facebook Marketplace or various other platforms to be resold.”

It is not only organised criminals who are taking advantage of parcels being left outside – opportunistic neighbours are another culprit. Asif, who lives in Derbyshire, had a parcel stolen from behind his bin, where it had been left by the courier, and he suspects his neighbour was responsible. “He denied it,” says the 53-year-old. But “I could tell from his face”.

Maddie from Bristol has a little more evidence to suggest that her neighbours were the culprits when her weekly box from the meal kit service Gousto went missing. She went downstairs to her building’s basement flat to ask its student occupiers if they had seen it. “They were in the process of moving out, and the cleaner, who was conducting the end-of-tenancy clean, answered,” she says. The cleaner claimed not to have seen the box, but as Maddie turned to leave, she saw “a pile of black sacks by the door in the alleyway, and poking out of one was the patterned cold box you get as part of a Gousto. We are 99% sure it was our box as no one else in the past has had a Gousto delivery to our building.” Though it was obviously disappointing to miss out on that week’s meals, Maddie was able to get a full refund from Gousto.

Even with police involvement, it can be difficult to catch parcel thieves, although it is sometimes possible with the help of video doorbell footage – as in the case of Peter Storer, who was caught on camera stealing from a woman’s doorstep in Leicester. Even if victims don’t have any evidence, Winter says it is important to report it. “You’ve got to report it to the police because you want to be in the statistics. You want to try to make sure that the police are paying attention to this.”

Some people, of course, have taken justice into their own hands. It is testament to how widespread the frustration about this issue is that videos of doorstep thieves, or “porch pirates” as they have become known, being tricked have gone viral on social media. Pranksters have left out “bait packages” that, when picked up, will set off everything from paint bombs to glitter explosions, with front-door cameras ready to capture the thief’s comeuppance. Arizona-based software engineer Alec Armbruster, who has had a number of parcels stolen, says he enjoys watching such videos because laughing at the thieves’ plans backfiring is “the only way I can take back control”.

Several years ago, Armbruster made a prank video of his own, filling a bait package with used cat litter. “I think it took a week and a half for the box to get picked up,” he says. “I came home one day and it was gone and I was like, ‘Yes!’ I ran inside to watch the footage. It was very exciting.” He had become used to having his parcels stolen, and says he would report every one. “Typically, they would send out an officer and I would never hear about it again.” So he decided to take matters into his own hands via the prank, “which helped because it turned from something extremely frustrating to something exciting and entertaining”.

He thinks the video was popular on social media because “it’s just extremely satisfying. We’ve all had things stolen from us and it’s very invading. And we all want to see justice for things like this. If someone thinks they are stealing something expensive, like an iPhone, but what they actually get is just dust, it’s quite funny.” That said, Armbruster admits that his prank “didn’t really bring justice”, in terms of stopping parcels getting stolen. “I thought or hoped it would, which sucks.”

There are more effective steps that can be taken to prevent parcel thefts. “The brands could do more to anonymise parcels or make it less attractive or less obvious to thieves that there might be something interesting inside,” Winter says. “Carriers can re-emphasise to their delivery agents: ‘Do not put things in a stupid place, if it’s visible from the road or visible to everybody.’” Instead, they should tell them to try “knocking the door a bit harder and waiting a few seconds”, though he says he is loth to criticise the carriers because, “they’re under massive pressure to deliver such high volumes, particularly at this time of year”.

Consumers need to play their part in preventing these thefts, too, by making sure they are ordering a delivery for a day they will be in, and providing the correct address. “It’s amazing how many times we see addresses given incorrectly,” Walmsley says. He also recommends buyers consider the different delivery methods on offer. “See if they’ve got signed-for options or carriers that you’ve used before, who you know you’ve received good delivery service from.” It could also be worth getting packages delivered to your work address, he says. “Business deliveries are a lot more successful.”

Winter agrees. “If you live in an apartment with no front garden or you’re on a street with a lot of visibility then, when you order, don’t have it delivered to home, select an out-of-home option.” He recommends corner shop and locker deliveries. He admits he has a vested interest in lockers because Quadient provides smart parcel locker solutions, but says he genuinely believes that “it’s a very convenient way to reduce that risk”.

Since Wedgwood’s parcels were stolen, she has become “quite paranoid” when she makes online orders. If she is out and receives a message to say something has been delivered, she texts her housemates to ask them to fetch it straight away. “When the buzzer goes now, we try to ask: ‘What’s the name on the parcel?’” before letting the courier in, to weed out impostors. She is not taking any chances, especially since she believes her parcel thief came back last year. “My flatmate said: ‘So weird, I’ve just come in and downstairs there was a random Boris bike left in the hallway.’ Alarm bells immediately went off,” she says.

Since Wedgwood has not had any luck asking her landlord to make her building more secure, she doesn’t expect the thieves to back down anytime soon. Unlike Armbruster, who managed to stop his parcels being stolen by moving to a more rural area, Wedgwood is not willing to find a new home because of this. “The rent is really low. I love the area. Also, I just don’t want to let the thieves win,” she says. “Why should I let them?”

Thompson, chairman of the Chief Executive Alliance and previously ranked as the world’s top CEO coach, and Loflin, Nasdaq’s Global Head of Board Advisory, joined forces to provide a 360-view of this loaded moment for leadership, from the C-suite and board perspectives, respectively. In a wide-ranging conversation with Fortune, they talked about the Shakespearean themes of leadership and turmoil and the feeling that “heavy is the head that wears the crown.”

For those aspiring to reach the top, Thompson shared the conventional wisdom he’d learned from his mentor, Marshall Goldsmith: “What got you here got you halfway there.” (Goldsmith had a New York Times bestseller in 2007 with What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.)

The transition from being a high-performing executive in a “swim lane” to having the “aperture of having a full enterprise” requires substantial new learning and skill development, Thompson argued, because no matter how great an executive you are or how prepared you think you might be, the stakes are existentially high. The risk that a CEO might “lose his or her head within the next year or so” is “easily like 20% or at the big brands It feels like it’s twice that,” said Thompson, who recently penned an essay on the subject of CEO “decapitation” for Fortune.

Adding to this pressure, Thompson and Loflin added, is the radical shift in board member expectations. Board members, who once might have been “golf buddies,” are now “really under the gun to perform.” They are “less patient” and expected to “actually deliver,” based on their subject matter expertise.

This environment demands nearly every candidate be ready to serve as a “peacetime in a wartime CEO,” Thompson said, capable of harvesting the best aspects of the company culture while also being “disrupting and breaking new ground.” An executive promoted from a functional role, such as a CFO, may possess the “gravitas of understanding the street and the shareholders,” but often lacks the breadth to “light hearts and minds” across the workforce, or do “ride-alongs with customers.”

The loneliness of the tower, and ‘relationology’

Fortune has been tracking this tenuous moment for leaders throughout 2025. Top recruitment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas found 1,235 CEOs had left (or lost) their jobs through the first half of 2025, a stunning 12% increase from 2024 and the highest year-to-date total since Challenger began tracking CEO turnover in 2002.

Jim Rossman, Barclays’ global head of shareholder advisory, who’s been closely tracking shareholder activism for decades, similarly found record activist-linked turnover at the top for 2025. “It feels like what activists have done is basically [to hold] public companies to the standards of private equity,” Rossman told Fortune in a previous interview, as they have come to view the CEO “more as an operator, not somebody who’s risen through the ranks.” In other words: Results matter.

The intense environment contributes to feelings of isolation. As CEOs often note, being the boss is a lonely job where leaders are caught in the middle, with information they cannot share with reports but must share with the board, creating a huge information asymmetry, as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella previously told McKinsey.

Carolyn Dewar, the co-leader and founder of McKinsey’s CEO Practice, previously told Fortune that “No one else in your organization or above you, like your board or your investors, see all the pieces you see.” She advocated for leaders to surround themselves with trusted advisors—“a kitchen cabinet” of sorts.

Similarly, Loflin told Fortune he’s fond of the concept of “relationology,” which he describes as “sort of a study of relationships.” He suggested leaders must develop a “portfolio of relationships of intimacy” that are “very context-relevant.” A leader’s effectiveness hinges on having fluency, for instance, when speaking to a CFO about analyst days, or working with a compliance team to keep the business safe or connecting authentically with union executives. Loflin said he’s often seen it being a “big surprise” to accomplished leaders that they have, say, seven different groups they need to engage and maybe as many as six new skills to really flesh out before they’re ready to take the enterprise to the next level.

This need for deep, context-aware connection also applies to personal life, Loflin added. The idea that a personal life and professional life can be entirely separate “undermines leadership and undermines the fabric of a company.” Critically, Loflin said, the chair must really know his CEO “at a deep level, like a Shakespearean level,” requiring a transparency that ensures appropriate accountability. After all, Loflin noted as one example, boards have to be mindful that a personal relationship that violates company policy can jeopardize corporate governance at the drop of a hat. The board really needs to know who their CEO is, maybe better than the CEO knows themselves.

The power and the privilege, the hubris and the humility

Loflin, who admitted to Fortune that he’s a bit of a Shakespeare nerd, noted the difference between a tragedy and a comedy is determined by “the vulnerability and the self-awareness of the protagonist,” and a tragic outcome results from a feeling he likened to “never recognizing whether I needed to grow or change.”

Thompson added that surviving as a CEO requires an “odd combination” of traits you might read in a Greek tragedy: hubris and humility.

The CEO must possess the hubris, or excessive pride, to believe they can be the best in their field, but also the profound humility that acknowledges they can’t do it alone.

The professional mandate is relentless, Thompson added, citing a key interview for the book from Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon: if you were the “same guy you were a year ago, you don’t deserve to be promoted.” Thompson said he thinks of hubris of being at “the edge of your competence, so rather than retreating, you actually should lean into that” to acquire the skills and help you need to keep growing as a professional.

For top leaders, Thompson said, the top job is not a prize to be won, but a “privilege to do this role.” Just as Olympic athletes must constantly improve, he added, leaders must recognize that breaking a record only attracts more competition.

Loflin urged boards and executives alike to move beyond a Wolf of Wall Street mindset and into “what it means to authentically care for and build the confidence and foster appropriate accountability.” He said that for many executives, admitting you have areas to improve on and get better at is a “special vulnerability.” He argued boards need more genuine, interpersonal affection—sometimes of the tough love variety—is needed to prevent a truly Shakespearean tragedy on their watch.

Loflin said he’d just had breakfast with a board director for a $30 billion company and the subject of love arose: “Do you love your management team?” The director said yes, definitely, almost like relatives. After all, they had been with the company over a decade and come to have deep relationships with other directors and their C-suite. Loflin argued that over decades of advising boards on corporate governance, he wishes more would adopt this sort of attitude.

“I don’t think it’s going to hurt anything in business because a good father has to talk to a troubled son, hopefully he’s mentoring when [the son is] getting himself in trouble.” After all, Loflin continued, “bad stuff happens, and I think some of these metaphors are important.” In other words, it shouldn’t be the Wolf of Wall Street, but the wolf—or the activist—is always at the door.

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The Federal Reserve is set to cut interest rates next week despite deep divisions among its officials on the direction of the US economy, according to leading academic economists.

The rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee meets on Tuesday, with the vast majority of investors expecting the US central bank to lower US borrowing costs by a quarter point for the third meeting in a row the following day.

Most of the economists polled by the Chicago Booth Clark Center on behalf of the Financial Times agree with the markets’ view, with 85 per cent of the 40 respondents agreeing that the Fed will ease borrowing costs in response to fears the US labour market is weakening.

However, they think the committee will almost certainly be divided on a move that looks set to leave the US central bank’s benchmark federal funds target range at its lowest level in more than three years. This comes amid mounting concerns that ordinary Americans are facing affordability pressures due to higher costs.

FOMC members have spent the run-up to the final vote of 2025 debating whether to prioritise a weakening US labour market over an inflation rate that has been above the central bank’s 2 per cent goal since the spring of 2021.

Several regional Fed presidents have said that, although they had not supported the Fed’s previous rate cut in October, they would back one next week because of concerns that inflation in the dominant services sector was creeping up. This is at a time when the full impact of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on the price of US imports is yet to be felt, they say.

New York Fed president John Williams signalled late last month that he and other leading members of the committee would back another quarter-point cut as insurance against a further slowdown in the US labour market.

Just one respondent to the FT-Chicago Booth poll said the 12 voting members of the FOMC would be able to overcome their differences and back a rate cut in unison. Sixty per cent of respondents thought there would be two dissents, with another third expecting three or more.

“If the rationale for the dissent is that they are missing their inflation target, then this can improve the credibility of the target,” said Stephen Cecchetti, a professor at Brandeis University. “At the same time, significant division — whether or not they vote against the decision — raises questions about the FOMC’s collective goals.”

There have not been more than two dissenting votes cast at an FOMC meeting since September 2019. The last time there were more than three was in 1992.

The most likely candidate to vote against a rate cut is Kansas City Fed president Jeff Schmid, who also dissented in October. Susan Collins, president of the Boston Fed, and Chicago’s Austan Goolsbee have indicated that they could join Schmid in voting against the consensus this time around.

Fed governor Michael Barr has also signalled he believes there is little room to lower borrowing costs. His counterpart on the board, Stephen Miran, will almost certainly call for a jumbo 50 basis point cut again.

Miran, a close ally of Trump, shares the US president’s desire for borrowing costs to fall rapidly.

After several strong years, many on the FOMC think the US labour market is beginning to cool. The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report showed an unexpectedly high number of jobs were added to the world’s largest economy in September. But unemployment has edged up, and more recent private sector data shows US businesses are firing more workers.

Many respondents to the poll agreed with the FOMC’s hawks that the US central bank needed to focus more on the fight against inflation than maintaining a strong labour market.

Forty-eight per cent thought that controlling prices should be the priority, against 5 per cent who thought the focus should be on jobs. The rest wanted both sides of the Fed’s dual mandate to be given equal weight.

“I would prefer that the US drop the dual mandate in favour of one that solely focuses on inflation,” said Deborah Lucas, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “A direct link for a strong effect of monetary policy on employment has not been empirically well established.”

While hawks also point to relatively strong US growth, doves highlight that the US economy is heavily reliant on a boom in AI and AI-adjacent activity that has driven capital spending and helped prop up retail spending on the back of higher valuations for tech stocks.

The respondents were also asked what a 20 per cent drop in the value of the benchmark S&P 500 stock index would do to the US economy. A third said the subsequent fall in consumption and investment would trigger a US recession, while almost two-thirds said US growth would weaken, but not by enough to trigger a serious slowdown.

Additional data visualisation by Ian Hodgson and Carolina Vargas

(Bloomberg) — Wall Street’s sentiment toward companies associated with artificial intelligence is shifting, and it’s all about two companies: OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) is down, and Alphabet Inc. (GOOG, GOOGL) is up.

The maker of ChatGPT is no longer seen as being on the cutting edge of AI technology and is facing questions about its lack of profitability and the need to grow rapidly to pay for its massive spending commitments. Meanwhile, Google’s parent is emerging as a deep-pocketed competitor with tentacles in every part of the AI trade.

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“OpenAI was the golden child earlier this year, and Alphabet was looked at in a very different light,” said Brett Ewing, chief market strategist at First Franklin Financial Services. “Now sentiment is much more tempered toward OpenAI.”

As a result, the shares of companies in OpenAI’s orbit — principally Oracle Corp. (ORCL), CoreWeave Inc. (CRWV), and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), but also Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) and SoftBank, which has an 11% stake in the company — are coming under heavy selling pressure. Meanwhile, Alphabet’s momentum is boosting not only its stock price, but also those it’s associated with like Broadcom Inc., Lumentum Holdings Inc., Celestica Inc., and TTM Technologies Inc.

The shift has been dramatic in magnitude and speed. Just a few weeks ago, OpenAI was sparking huge rallies in any company related to it. Now, those connections look more like an anchor. It’s a change that carries wide-ranging implications, given how central the closely held company has been to the AI mania that has driven the stock market’s three-year rally.

“A light has been shined on the complexity of the financing, the circular deals, the debt issues,” Ewing said. “I’m sure this exists around the Alphabet ecosystem to a certain degree, but it was exposed as pretty extreme for OpenAI’s deals, and appreciating that was a game-changer for sentiment.”

A basket of companies connected to OpenAI has gained 74% in 2025, which is impressive but far shy of the 146% jump by Alphabet-exposed stocks. The technology-heavy Nasdaq 100 Index is up 22%.

The skepticism surrounding OpenAI can be dated to August, when it unveiled GPT-5 to mixed reactions. It ramped up last month when Alphabet released the latest version of it Gemini AI model and got rave reviews. As a result, OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman declared a “code red” effort to improve the quality of ChatGPT, delaying other projects until it gets its signature product in line.

‘All the Pieces’

Alphabet’s perceived strength goes beyond Gemini. The company has the third highest market capitalization in the S&P 500 and a ton of cash at its disposal. It also has host of adjacent businesses, like Google Cloud and a semiconductor manufacturing operation that’s gaining traction. And that’s before you consider the company’s AI data, talent and distribution, or its successful subsidiaries like YouTube and Waymo.

“There’s a growing sense that Alphabet has all the pieces to emerge as the dominant AI model builder,” said Brian Colello, technology equity senior strategist at Morningstar. “Just a couple months ago, investors would’ve given that title to OpenAI. Now there’s more uncertainty, more competition, more risk that OpenAI isn’t the slam-dunk winner.”

Representatives for OpenAI and Alphabet didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The difference between being first or second place goes beyond bragging rights, it also has significant financial ramifications for the companies and their partners. For example, if users gravitating to Gemini slows ChatGPT’s growth, it will be harder for OpenAI to pay for cloud-computing capacity from Oracle or chips from AMD.

By contrast, Alphabet’s partners in building out its AI effort are thriving. Shares of Lumentum, which makes optical components for Alphabet’s data centers, have more than tripled this year, putting them among the 30 best performers in the Russell 3000 Index. Celestica provides the hardware for Alphabet’s AI buildout, and its stock is up 252% in 2025. Meanwhile Broadcom — which is building the tensor processing unit, or TPU, chips Alphabet uses — has seen its stock price leap 68% since the end of last year.

OpenAI has announced a number of ambitious deals in recent months. The flurry of activity “rightfully brought scrutiny and concern over whether OpenAI can fund all this, whether it is biting off more than it can chew,” Colello said. “The timing of its revenue growth is uncertain, and every improvement a competitor makes adds to the risk that it can’t reach its aspirations.”

In fairness, investors greeted many of these deals with excitement, because they appeared to mint the next generation of AI winners. But with the shift in sentiment, they’re suddenly taking a wait-and-see attitude.

“When people thought it could generate revenue and become profitable, those big deal numbers seemed possible,” said Brian Kersmanc, portfolio manager at GQG Partners, which has about $160 billion in assets. “Now we’re at a point where people have stopped believing and started questioning.”

Kersmanc sees the AI euphoria as the “dot-com era on steroids,” and said his firm has gone from being heavily overweight tech to highly skeptical.

“We’re trying to avoid areas of over-hype and a lot of those were fueled by OpenAI,” he said. “Since a lot of places have been touched by this, it will be a painful unwind. It isn’t just a few tech names that need to come down, though they’re a huge part of the index. All these bets have parallel trades, like utilities, with high correlations. That’s the fear we have, not just that OpenAI spun up this narrative, but that so many things were lifted on the hype.”

OpenAI’s public-relation flaps haven’t helped. The startup’s Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar recently suggested the US government “backstop the guarantee that allows the financing to happen,” which raised some eyebrows. But she and Altman later clarified that the company hasn’t requested such guarantees.

Then there was Altman’s appearance on the “Bg2 Pod,” where he was asked how the company can make spending commitments that far exceed its revenue. “If you want to sell your shares, I’ll find you a buyer — I just, enough,” was the CEO’s response.

Altman’s dismissal was problematic because the gap between OpenAI’s revenue and its spending plans between now and 2033 is about $207 billion, according to HSBC estimates.

“Closing the gap would need one or a combination of factors, including higher revenue than in our central case forecasts, better cost management, incremental capital injections, or debt issuance,” analyst Nicolas Cote-Colisson wrote in a research note on Nov. 24. Considering that OpenAI is expected to generate revenue of more than $12 billion in 2025, its compute cost “compounds investor nervousness about associated returns,” not only for the company itself, but also “for the interlaced AI chain,” he wrote.

To be sure, companies like Oracle and AMD aren’t solely reliant on OpenAI. They operate in areas that continue to see a lot of demand, and their products could find customers even without OpenAI. Furthermore, the weakness in the stocks could represent a buying opportunity, as companies tied to ChatGPT and the chips that power it are trading at a discount to those exposed to Gemini and its chips for the first time since 2016, according to a recent Wells Fargo analysis.

“I see a lot of untapped demand and penetration across industries, and that will ultimately underpin growth,” said Kieran Osborne, chief investment officer at Mission Wealth, which has about $13 billion in assets under management. “Monetization is the end goal for these companies, and so long as they work toward that, that will underpin the investment case.”

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