Nvidia Refuses to Walk Away From OpenAI, Commits $30 Billion in Fresh Equity

Some relationships are worth fighting for. Nvidia, despite the collapse of a $100 billion deal, the emergence of chip rivalry from AMD and Broadcom, and the broader questioning of OpenAI’s business fundamentals, is reportedly committing $30 billion in fresh equity to the ChatGPT maker’s next funding round. It is a statement of intent that carries enormous weight in the AI industry.
OpenAI’s funding round will reportedly raise approximately $100 billion in total, at a $730 billion valuation — nearly double what Anthropic recently achieved and just below SpaceX. Amazon, SoftBank, and Microsoft will join Nvidia as investors, making this one of the most consequential capital events in technology history.
The path to this deal involved a notable reversal. Last September, Nvidia announced a $100 billion investment that was tied to OpenAI’s chip purchases — a circular arrangement that generated enormous publicity before being quietly abandoned this month after it emerged the deal was never formally binding. OpenAI, it turned out, had been exploring chip alternatives behind the scenes even as the deal was being celebrated publicly.
Those alternatives — AMD and Broadcom — have since been formalized as partnerships. OpenAI’s hardware strategy is now officially diversified, removing the chip exclusivity logic that had framed the original Nvidia deal. Against that backdrop, Nvidia’s decision to continue investing in OpenAI through a clean equity arrangement rather than retreating is a deliberate and bold strategic choice.
The financial case for OpenAI at $730 billion requires significant future growth. ChatGPT’s market share has fallen from 86.7% to 64.5% in a year. Anthropic is winning in enterprise software. Cash burn is high. Advertising experiments are attracting backlash from Anthropic and skepticism from observers. Key investors are publicly uncertain. But Nvidia is in — $30 billion worth of in — and that matters more than any individual challenge facing the company right now.