I’ve been watching the Nvidia-OpenAI relationship with the kind of interest you reserve for watching two giants who absolutely need each other pretend they have other options. The latest Wall Street Journal piece about friction between the companies had Jensen Huang doing damage control in Taipei, calling it “nonsense” while simultaneously declining to specify how much Nvidia would actually invest.
That right there tells you everything.
The Non-Binding Nature of Everything
When companies start emphasizing that deals are “nonbinding,” that’s usually when things get interesting. The original plan had Nvidia investing up to $100 billion in OpenAI plus building 10 gigawatts of computing infrastructure. That’s not just money, that’s nation-state level energy commitment for compute. Now the WSJ reports discussions have scaled back to “mere tens of billions.”
I use “mere” ironically here, but in the context of artificial intelligence infrastructure at this scale, tens of billions really is a significant step down from a hundred billion. The compute requirements for training frontier models aren’t getting smaller. They’re getting exponentially larger with each generation.
What Huang Actually Said vs. What He Meant
Huang’s public comments are masterclass in saying everything and nothing simultaneously. “We will invest a great deal of money” and “I believe in OpenAI” sound great in headlines. But letting Sam Altman announce the raise amount? That’s passing the ball when you’re standing at the free throw line.
The part about OpenAI being “one of the most consequential companies of our time” is probably true, but consequential doesn’t always mean profitable or even sustainable. Huang reportedly has private concerns about OpenAI’s business strategy, which is fair given that OpenAI burns through capital faster than most startups burn through their Series A.
What’s really happening here is Nvidia hedging. They want exposure to OpenAI’s upside without being married to what might be an increasingly uncertain business model. Microsoft is already deeply embedded as both investor and infrastructure provider. Where does that leave Nvidia beyond being a hardware vendor?
The Anthropic and Google Problem
The WSJ mentioned Huang expressing concerns about competitors like Anthropic and Google. This is where it gets technically interesting. Nvidia sells to everyone. They’re powering OpenAI, Anthropic, Google’s AI efforts, and basically every other frontier lab. But as these companies mature, the risk calculation changes.
Google has its own TPUs. They’re not as dominant as Nvidia’s GPUs for most workloads, but they exist and they’re improving. Anthropic is scaling fast and might not need the kind of preferential treatment that comes with a massive investment relationship. The landscape is fragmenting in ways that make a $100 billion bet on any single player look increasingly risky.
I keep thinking about what 10 gigawatts of computing infrastructure actually means. That’s roughly the output of several nuclear power plants dedicated entirely to running transformer models. The energy requirements alone make this a geopolitical issue, not just a business deal. Countries are starting to think about AI compute capacity the way they think about semiconductor fabrication or oil reserves.
What This Means for Developers
If you’re building on OpenAI’s APIs or planning infrastructure around their models, this kind of uncertainty matters. A scaled-back investment doesn’t mean OpenAI is failing, but it does suggest that even their closest partners are recalibrating expectations. The “move fast and raise billions” phase of AI might be giving way to something more measured.
The interesting dynamic here is that Nvidia needs OpenAI to succeed, but not necessarily to dominate. A healthy ecosystem of multiple frontier labs all buying H100s and whatever comes next is probably better for Nvidia than one company holding all the cards. Jensen Huang is smart enough to know this.
OpenAI’s spokesperson said Nvidia “will remain central as we scale what comes next,” which is probably accurate but doesn’t address the core tension. Central as a vendor or central as a strategic partner? Those are very different relationships with very different implications for how OpenAI navigates the next phase of scaling.
The $100 billion funding round that OpenAI is reportedly pursuing would be historic even by Silicon Valley standards. That Microsoft, Amazon, SoftBank, and potentially Nvidia are all in discussions tells you both how important OpenAI has become and how no single player wants to own too much of the risk. When you’re raising that much money, you’re not just building a company anymore, you’re building critical infrastructure with all the complexity that entails.