We have to talk. It’s not you, it’s me. Our love broke. That’s just what seems to be happening between NVIDIA and OpenAI, who just four months ago were living an idyllic moment. The first announced a mammoth investment of 100,000 million dollars in the second and everything indicated that we could have before us a new great technological empire. It was the most ambitious marriage in the history of technology, but now that marriage is failing.
a decade of love. It was August 2016 and everyone knew about NVIDIA but almost no one knew about OpenAI. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, saw clearly that the company had potential, so gave Elon Musk a DGX-1 serverits first “desktop supercomputer” for AI. OpenAI was using more and more advanced NVIDIA GPUs to develop its work, and with the explosion of ChatGPT in 2022, OpenAI became one of the largest customers of NVIDIA GPUs, which in turn was buying shares of OpenAI. The quid pro quo began.
August 2016. The idyll began. Jensen Huang handed a DGX-1 to the co-founder and still member of the board of directors of OpenAI at the time, Elon Musk.
From where I said I say… In September 2025 NVIDIA announced a “strategic investment” of up to $100 billion in OpenAI. Was one more gigantic case of circular financing that apparently made these two companies stronger and the others weaker. For a few days there has been talk that this announcement is being blurred and the agreement according to The Wall Street Journal is frozen. There they indicate that according to Huang, said agreement was not binding and he privately criticized that OpenAI had a lack of discipline in its business strategy.
…to where I say Diego. At a meeting with journalists in Taipei on Saturday Indian that NVIDIA will “absolutely be involved” in the new funding round that OpenAI is carrying out. In fact, he assured that “we will invest a large amount of money, probably the largest investment we have ever made,” but when asked that this investment would be over $100 billion, he said “No, no, nothing like that.” Furthermore, as shown in the video of the included tweet, he clarified that the investment “we never said we were going to invest $100 billion in a single round” and highlighted that “there was never a commitment.” “We were invited to invest up to $100 billion and we were honored,” he explained, but added that “we will consider each round of financing separately.”
narrative clash. Huang’s statements made Sam Altman quickly want to downplay the matter saying that “we expect to be a gigantic customer (of NVIDIA) for a very long time” and adding that “I don’t know where all this madness is coming from.” However, the statements of both parties suggest that there are differences of opinion and a latent tension in that hypothetical commitment that they had reached and that perhaps was not communicated or clarified adequately in September.
OpenAI has its own NVIDIA complaints. In Reuters they point out that OpenAI is “dissatisfied” with some of NVIDIA’s AI chips because while they are great for model training tasks—preparing them before we use them—they are not so great for inference. OpenAI is said to be looking for alternatives to inference chips and is in talks with Cerebras and Groq to provide them with advanced inference chips. Here’s a bonus chapter: NVIDIA reached an agreement with Groq to license (“pseudo-acquire”) the company’s technology for $20 billion, which has blocked OpenAI’s talks with Groq.
And look for other girlfriends. Sam Altman doesn’t hesitate when it comes to looking for alternatives to prosper. He did it when the relationship broke down with Microsoft and He looked for other girlfriends like SoftBankOracle or NVIDIA itself. But in reality he plays several sides, because he has become a shareholder in AMD, one of NVIDIA’s biggest rivals. But there is more. A lot more.
Polyamory. Not to mention that Amazon is in talks with Sam Atlman to close an investment of up to 50 billion dollars on OpenAI. Or that Altman is also in negotiations with Softbank that could result in a investment of 30,000 million additional payments by the Japanese company, which had already promised a investment of 40,000 million of dollars a year ago. The amounts are dizzying, but OpenAI handles them as if nothing had happened.
Dependencies and reverse lock-in. Typically, companies fear being locked into dependence on a vendor like NVIDIA. Here NVIDIA seems to be suffering just the opposite: being trapped by a client (OpenAI). If NVIDIA invests 100 billion, it becomes too dependent on the success of OpenAI. If Altman’s company fails or changes course, the hole in NVIDIA’s balance sheet would be catastrophic. It is “mutual assured destruction.”
Image | Hillel Steinberg | Village Global
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