Despite the dramatic unraveling of a $100 billion arrangement just weeks ago, Nvidia has not walked away from OpenAI. The chip giant is reportedly preparing a $30 billion equity investment in the AI company’s next funding round, demonstrating remarkable resilience in what has been a turbulent few weeks for the relationship between the two tech powerhouses.
The new deal is structurally different from its predecessor in important ways. Rather than tying the investment to OpenAI’s purchase of Nvidia chips, this arrangement grants Nvidia a straightforward equity stake in exchange for its capital. The change addresses the “circular deal” criticism that had dogged the original agreement and led to its eventual collapse.
OpenAI’s funding round is expected to be enormous by any measure — approximately $100 billion in total, with a resulting valuation of around $730 billion. That would put the company just shy of SpaceX in terms of private market capitalization, and nearly double the valuation of rival Anthropic, which recently completed its own $30 billion raise.
Nvidia’s previous announcement of the $100 billion deal had driven its own stock to a market capitalization above $5 trillion, illustrating just how sensitive financial markets have become to signals about AI investment flows. The collapse of that deal had corresponding effects on market sentiment, contributing to volatility that was already elevated due to concerns about AI’s impact on employment and software company valuations.
OpenAI continues to grapple with real business challenges even as its valuation soars. ChatGPT’s dominance in the AI assistant market has weakened significantly, and the company is falling behind Anthropic specifically in the enterprise software segment — a crucial and lucrative market. Advertising experiments, cash burn, and uncertain chip supply relationships all add complexity to the OpenAI story heading into this landmark funding round.