The numbers associated with artificial intelligence investment have become almost too large to comprehend. OpenAI is raising $100 billion. Its valuation will reach $730 billion. Nvidia alone is reportedly committing $30 billion in equity. Amazon, SoftBank, and Microsoft are joining. These figures make the AI investment wave of the past three years look like a preview.
Nvidia’s path to this investment has been anything but linear. A $100 billion deal announced last September was celebrated, criticized for its circular structure, confirmed to be non-binding, and then quietly abandoned. OpenAI announced chip partnerships with AMD and Broadcom, reducing its hardware dependence on Nvidia. The relationship appeared to be in jeopardy.
Instead of retreating, Nvidia restructured. The new $30 billion equity investment removes the chip purchase obligations that made the original deal circular and replaces them with straightforward ownership. Nvidia will be a financial stakeholder in OpenAI’s future — not a vendor with a built-in customer, but an investor with a genuine bet on the company’s value.
That bet is made against a backdrop of genuine challenge. ChatGPT’s market share has fallen from 86.7% to 64.5% in a year. Anthropic is gaining in enterprise software. Cash burn is high. Advertising is controversial. Key investors are still publicly uncertain about the timing and scale of their commitments. And Broadcom’s CEO has expressed limited near-term expectations for the company’s OpenAI relationship.
Yet the investment flows continue — and at scales that would have been unimaginable even five years ago. Nvidia’s $30 billion equity commitment to OpenAI is a signal that the AI investment wave is not receding but deepening, moving from supply chain deals to genuine equity participation. Whether the valuations of today will be justified by the revenues of tomorrow is the question that will define the next chapter of this extraordinary story.