A Message From Weiss Ratings

Dear Reader,

In a few short months, the US government could make a sweeping change to bank accounts nationwide.

It will give them unprecedented powers to control your bank account.

They could closely track every transaction... even freeze it.

Fortunately, there are 4 simple steps you can take today that could safeguard your savings.

Discover these 4 simple steps here.

Good luck and God bless!

Martin D. Weiss, PhD
Weiss Ratings Founder

OpenAI's Revenue Scare Could Be a Big Opportunity for Investors

Authored by Thomas Hughes. Posted: 10/12/2026.

The October report that OpenAI's annualized revenue run rate was approaching $50 billion—roughly $20 billion below earlier reports—highlights a persistent disconnect between investor perceptions and the reality of AI growth, as well as a potential opportunity for investors.

The broader market, driven by headlines and hearsay, still doesn’t comprehend the scope, scale, and reality of AI. It reflects a deep, persistent anxiety that AI isn’t happening, even though all the data suggests otherwise—including OpenAI’s supposedly “weak” revenue run rate.

What the market got wrong was easy to avoid: It compared apples to oranges. While OpenAI’s run rate was far below expectations, it didn’t include revenue from systems partners, while the earlier forecast did, making comparisons with the prior figure worthless. The reality is that demand for compute continues to outstrip supply, and bottlenecks threaten to curtail capacity ramps over the coming years.

OpenAI's annualized revenue run rate grew 77% during the third quarter, with continued growth expected. Forecasts put its run rate at $70 billion or higher by year-end and expect it to continue growing over the following year.

For the rest of the AI industry, this means current trends are likely to continue strongly, potentially accelerating by year-end or early 2027. Factors such as Advanced Micro Devices' (NASDAQ: AMD) Helios launch and NVIDIA’s (NASDAQ: NVDA) upcoming Vera Rubin release are two reasons why.

OpenAI’s IPO Just Got More Complicated

The biggest impact of OpenAI's revenue surprise may be on its IPO ambitions. The news doesn't fundamentally change the outlook for the AI trade, but it could affect OpenAI's potential valuation. The $50 billion figure is about 28.5% lower than previously reported figures and implies a revenue multiple of 28x at a $1.4 trillion valuation. Private markets value tech stocks based on run rates, while public markets focus on revenue, making it more important than ever for the company to achieve its target range of $280 billion to $350 billion in revenue by 2030. For now, the push for AI safety has pushed the IPO timeline to 2027, with some analysts forecasting a midyear IPO at the earliest.

One risk for OpenAI is that Anthropic goes public first. In that scenario, Anthropic would set the benchmark for reporting and growth, leaving OpenAI to reformulate its reporting and filing metrics to match. Word on the street is that OpenAI could IPO before Thanksgiving, beating the industry leader by half a year or more. Anthropic is targeting a valuation above $2 trillion, more than OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s expressed baseline.

Is Oracle’s Outlook Undercut by OpenAI’s Miss?

Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) is among the companies most directly impacted by OpenAI’s business. Its contract with OpenAI is worth $300 billion over five years and accounts for about 45% of its backlog.

The revenue miss raises questions about whether OpenAI can live up to its commitment, but there are still signs that it can. The accelerating run rate reveals the strength of OpenAI’s offerings, with internal figures showing a 107% increase in Enterprise revenue run rate—3,000 basis points better than the headline figure. Enterprise demand is likely to continue growing robustly, driven by a virtuous cycle in which AI results generate additional AI demand.

Meanwhile, Oracle’s most recent results reflect the monetization of previous investments. Revenue growth accelerated to 30% as new capacity was added, driving a record quarter. Total cloud revenue increased 62%, while cloud infrastructure revenue rose 121%. More importantly, cash flow improved by 184% and would have been a stock-price catalyst if not for negative free cash flow. Backlog metrics were also robust, with the $664 billion in second-quarter remaining performance obligations up 46% year over year, along with $30 billion in new contracts.

Negative free cash flow is a real risk and a concern for investors. AI requires a massive initial capital outlay, and it takes time to monetize. What the market gets wrong is that the buildout is in transition. Initial builds are coming online, companies like Oracle are monetizing their investments, and the trend will gain momentum in 2027. Next year's narrative will be less spending, more monetization, and a trajectory for both metrics to continue improving in 2028.

SaaSpocalypse Is a Tailwind for Business

SaaSpocalypse fears drove Oracle’s stock price decline, as well as the declines of many other companies, but AI didn’t disrupt software providers' businesses; rather, it accelerated them.

Enterprises want insights and automation, and both are driving the need for security. That means securing not just frontier AI models but the entire tech ecosystem, which is unprepared for the volume, speed, and tenacity of AI-driven cyber threats. Companies like Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW), MongoDB (NASDAQ: MDB), and Datadog (NASDAQ: DDOG) are just three examples of companies leveraging AI to their advantage and that of their clients.

A Message From TradeWins

Ian Cooper here...

It’s devastatingly simple.

But it’s working.

It’s a simple trade where we target a triple-digit return in just 9 days.

It doesn’t work every single time, of course. But the win rate (73%) and the return on capital (2,671%) stand on their own.

I’ll show you the strategy AND I’ll even give you my newest report at no charge right here:

The Simple Path: Target triple-digit returns in just 9 days

In your corner,

Ian Cooper

Alphabet's $1.8 Billion Black Hills Deal Powers AI Data Center Push

Author: Jeffrey Neal Johnson. Article Published: 10/8/2026.

Artificial intelligence (AI) hyperscaling has hit a physical wall. Tech conglomerates have spent the past two years securing semiconductor chips, but powering those processors requires more electricity than the existing grid can supply.

Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) recently signaled a solution by executing a definitive agreement to directly finance a natural gas and microgrid expansion with Black Hills Corp. (NYSE: BKH) in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Alphabet's decision to directly finance the $1.8 billion, 564-megawatt power facility materially changes Black Hills' valuation framework. Black Hills is shifting from a steady-state regional power provider to a high-free-cash-flow, critical-infrastructure play on the AI revolution. Investors tracking AI infrastructure may want to look beyond chips and fiber optics, as utilities are increasingly becoming premium technology assets.

Alphabet Bypasses the Grid for Dedicated Power

Tech conglomerates are absorbing substantial infrastructure costs, with Alphabet recently raising its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to approximately $195 billion to $205 billion. A significant portion of that capital is earmarked for data centers, which require constant, uninterrupted baseload energy. Traditional grid procurement is too slow, heavily regulated and fragmented to meet AI's aggressive timelines.

To address this bottleneck, Alphabet bypassed standard centralized grid queues and partnered directly with Black Hills to establish a dedicated power ecosystem. The deal commits Black Hills to a $1.8 billion capital expenditure to construct 564 megawatts of company-owned natural gas generation by approximately 2029. Alongside the grid-connected service, Black Hills will manage a 2.1-gigawatt microgrid composed of third-party contracted resources in Wyoming.

This localized, privately managed microgrid structure will allow Alphabet to rapidly scale its Cheyenne data center operations while keeping the energy source geographically ring-fenced. By paying Black Hills a contractually defined microgrid management fee, Alphabet effectively turns the regional utility into a high-margin energy coordinator. For investors, this shift indicates that the primary bottleneck to technology growth is no longer software or processing power, but localized energy generation.

Locking in Returns: The Economics of Tech Power Deals

The financial mechanics of the Cheyenne agreement provide Black Hills with decades of revenue visibility, changing how analysts model the utility provider's long-term earnings trajectory. The company is projected to generate approximately $150 million in net income by 2030 and is expected to deliver about $2.4 billion in unlevered free cash flow through the contract's expiration in 2048.

Historically, the market has been skeptical of utilities undertaking billion-dollar capital projects because of debt burdens and execution risks. Alphabet largely neutralized these risks by providing $399 million in refundable advances for long-lead equipment procurement. This upfront capital injection de-risks the early construction phase, lowers near-term financing costs and helps Black Hills preserve its investment-grade credit rating.

The Generation Facilities Agreement includes strict regulatory safeguards. A primary concern for utility investors is stranded-asset risk: the possibility that a data center project is abandoned, leaving the utility provider with an expensive facility and no buyer for its power.

The contract structure guarantees full recovery of the generation capital investment over the term, placing the stranded-asset risk on Alphabet. By passing inflation and interest-rate volatility directly to the technology giant, Black Hills ensures that existing retail customers face no cost shifting while utility shareholders benefit from more insulated returns.

Earnings Momentum Meets Multi-Decade Revenue Visibility

Before the Alphabet deal was finalized, Black Hills demonstrated the strength of its fundamentals in its second-quarter report. The company posted earnings per share of 54 cents, beating the 41-cent consensus estimate, along with 3.1% year-over-year revenue growth. The new power agreement adds a multidecade growth catalyst to an already stable operational baseline.

Black Hills offers a 3.7% dividend yield. Because the Alphabet contract protects Black Hills from traditional operational cost pressures, the dividend is relatively well insulated. The yield functions similarly to a secured corporate bond, but it now carries the equity upside of a technology-adjacent growth stock.

Institutional positioning indicates that the market is actively repricing Black Hills to reflect this new reality. Before the public announcement, Bank of America raised its price target on Black Hills to $97 from $87. Currently trading at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of approximately 17.5, Black Hills is undergoing multiple expansion that helps bridge the gap between a traditional utility and a critical technology partner.

Re-Rating the Sector: When Utilities Become Tech Targets

The Black Hills agreement provides a blueprint for how cloud providers may solve localized energy shortages in the future. Cloud backlogs are estimated in the hundreds of billions across the technology sector, and the electricity needed to clear that backlog does not currently exist on the public grid. Regulated utilities with excess capacity or regulatory frameworks that can rapidly approve capacity expansions may function as high-yield extensions of the data center ecosystem.

This dynamic makes mid-cap regional utilities prime targets for joint ventures, direct-financing agreements or outright acquisitions. Companies situated near major fiber routes and possessing localized natural gas or nuclear assets have newfound pricing power with the world's largest technology conglomerates. Hyperscalers are signaling a willingness to pay premium rates and fund capital costs upfront to ensure their facilities can power on.

Investors tracking the data center build-out may want to examine regional utilities through this lens. As technology companies lock in gigawatt-scale power agreements, utilities that can bypass grid congestion and deliver dedicated energy solutions will likely see sustained institutional interest and structural re-ratings.