Five months after announcing a $100 billion letter of intent for OpenAI , Nvidia is now close to finalizing a deal with Sam Altman's startup, but for a much smaller amount. The expectation is that a $30 billion investment will be completed in the coming days.
The check from the world's most valuable company is part of a larger funding round that is on track to raise more than $100 billion and will value the owner of ChatGPT at $830 billion – including the new investment – which would represent one of the largest private capital raises in history.
Last October, the company was valued at US$500 billion. And OpenAI is expected to surpass US$1 trillion in its IPO, which is projected to take place by 2027.
The expectation is that OpenAI will reinvest a large portion of its new capital in Nvidia 's own hardware. The reversal of the previously announced deal comes amid investor apprehension about the health of the artificial intelligence (AI) sector, which has contributed to a 17% drop in US technology company stocks since the beginning of 2026.
Last year's deal placed both companies at the center of the AI boom, and further helped propel Nvidia to a market value of over $5 trillion a few weeks later.
This accelerated a frenetic period of negotiations for Sam Altman's AI startup, which struck deals with rival chipmakers such as AMD and Broadcom, and with cloud providers including Oracle .
Although well-received by market analysts at the time, the wave of agreements uniting suppliers, customers, and investors in the AI sector has generated concern among some experts regarding the possible formation of a growing bubble in this sector.
Under the terms of the $100 billion deal, Nvidia would have invested ten $10 billion installments as OpenAI's demand for computing power grew over the years, in exchange for a significant stake in the AI startup.
OpenAI, for its part, planned to purchase millions of AI processors from Nvidia as part of its plans to deploy up to 10 gigawatts (GWs) of new computing capacity.
In January, The Wall Street Journal reported that the deal was "frozen." Now, in fact, it has been replaced by a more direct negotiation, in which Nvidia will make the investment in exchange for OpenAI stock.
This funding will support the deployment of gigawatts of new computing capacity and will likely be followed by other deals over time, according to people close to the companies.
In addition to the deal with Nvidia, the San Francisco-based startup is also in the final stages of negotiations with SoftBank, which will invest $30 billion, and with Amazon, which could invest up to $50 billion as part of a broader partnership involving the use of OpenAI models.
MGX, a technology investment fund backed by the Abu Dhabi state, and Microsoft are also expected to invest billions of dollars, while OpenAI executives continue to meet with other investors this week to raise more funds.
In these conversations, OpenAI has informed investors that it intends to invest approximately US$600 billion in computing resources, including from Nvidia, Amazon, and Microsoft, between 2026 and 2030, according to a source with access to the company.
The owner of ChatGPT argues that access to computing resources will be the best defense against competitors. To that end, it has been striving to secure as much infrastructure and electricity supply as possible to meet what executives foresee as unlimited demand for AI tools.
OpenAI's revenue surpassed $20 billion earlier this year on an annualized basis, a metric preferred by startups that projects recent revenue into the following year. Its revenue growth closely followed the company's increased access to computing power, with each of those assets roughly tripling each year.
Today, Nvidia's market capitalization is US$4.6 trillion. Over the past 12 months, the shares of the company led by Jensen Huang on Nasdaq have appreciated by 34.1%.
