When The Wall Street Journal reported an apparent stall in Nvidia’s plan to put up as much as $100 billion for OpenAI, markets jittered and commentators reached for breakup metaphors. Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, moved quickly to calm the waters: the $100 billion figure was an aspirational cap in a non‑binding letter of intent, he said, while reaffirming that Nvidia will participate in OpenAI’s next financing round and hopes to back future rounds and the eventual IPO. Sam Altman of OpenAI answered in kind: his company still wants a long‑term commercial relationship with Nvidia, which makes the GPUs that underpin OpenAI’s training and inference infrastructure.
The apparent reconciliation hides a material scaling back. Multiple sources now indicate Nvidia is close to committing roughly $20 billion in the current round — a large cheque by almost any standard, but only a fifth of the headline number first circulated last year. That gap is not merely numerical; it reframes the deal from an epochal strategic marriage to a pragmatic, staged commercial alignment. The optics matter: investors treat an explicit, guaranteed $100 billion commitment differently from a sequence of conditional investments tied to milestones and commercial returns.
The backstory stretches beyond headline arithmetic. In September 2025 Nvidia and OpenAI signed an LOI that envisioned up to $100 billion of support to build at least 10 gigawatts of data‑centre power and to secure priority access to Nvidia’s most advanced chips. For OpenAI, such an arrangement would lock supply at scale and accelerate model training; for Nvidia, it would have been both a revenue and reputational coup, cementing its role at the heart of any path to general‑purpose AI. But by late January 2026 reports surfaced that Nvidia insiders and Huang himself regarded the LOI as non‑binding and still subject to negotiation — an account that precipitated an immediate share price wobble.
Technical and commercial strains help explain the recalibration. OpenAI’s compute needs have exploded — from roughly 0.2 gigawatts in 2023 to an estimated 1.9 gigawatts in 2025 — and executives admit they are exploring alternative suppliers and architectures to optimise latency and cost for inference tasks. Publicly, OpenAI stresses that Nvidia remains its core partner; privately, it has experimented with companies such as Cerebras, negotiated with Groq, and discussed possibilities with Broadcom and AMD. That posture is consistent with a large purchaser trying to diversify supply and build leverage, not necessarily with a sudden desire to decouple.
The uncertainty rippled to third parties. Oracle, which reportedly signed a five‑year cloud services agreement with OpenAI worth as much as $300 billion in aggregate, has seen investor nerves surface: its stock pulled back and credit‑default swaps widened amid questions over whether OpenAI can secure the financing to underpin such commitments. Oracle responded by announcing a substantial financing plan — reported in the tens of billions — and by publicly downplaying the impact of Nvidia‑OpenAI negotiations on its own prospects.
Analysts read the episode as a stress test for an emergent AI industrial ecosystem. Nvidia’s public reticence about committing a single lump sum reflects standard corporate risk management: even for a market leader, hundreds of billions would tie up capital and invite scrutiny over valuation and governance. For OpenAI, diversifying hardware suppliers is sensible hedging given the performance and supply‑chain constraints of peak‑demand environments. The result is a pragmatic, if occasionally awkward, partnership: deep mutual dependence married to transactional caution.
What matters beyond the drama is the structural signal. The industry has shifted from speculative faith in limitless funding and instantaneous technical breakthroughs toward more conservative, staged capital allocation and supply‑chain planning. A $20 billion commitment from Nvidia is still historically large and keeps the companies strategically aligned; the downsizing of the headline figure merely underscores that the age of headline‑grabbing memoranda of intent is giving way to incremental, deliverable engagements.
For policy‑makers and competitors, the episode offers a reminder that market power and technological supremacy are not immutable. Nvidia’s chips remain the practical backbone of most large models today, but the company cannot assume unconditional loyalty nor unlimited financial exposure. Buyers such as OpenAI will continue to push for alternatives, and cloud providers and chip rivals will press to profit from that demand. The alliance will survive — because the cost of serious separation is prohibitive — but it will be managed on terms that emphasise deliverability, commercial discipline and staged capital commitments.