OpenAI has announced that will abandon development of Soraits AI video generator, just six months after the launch of its standalone app. Disney, which had announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI in exchange for licensing its characters for Sora, has confirmed that the deal will not go ahead. The money never changed handsand joins others in recent weeks that send a worrying message. One that calls into question the real strength of the most valued company in the AI sector.
Paper agreements. In recent months, OpenAi has been the protagonist of a frenetic string of announcements that have shaken the stock markets and sent prices skyrocketing. Analysts like Ed Zitron have documented in detail how these agreements are for now more smoke than anything else: all of them were “letters of intent”, conditional commitments that now seem increasingly difficult to come true. There are examples everywhere.
The NVIDIA case: the one hundred billion that did not exist. In September 2025 NVIDIA announced a “strategic partnership” with OpenAI to invest “up to 100 billion dollars” and build 10 GW of data centers. Four months later, the company led by Jensen Huang considerably reduced that investment to 30 billion dollars. Jensen Huang recently stated that this will “probably” be the last round he will enter into OpenAI and clarified that the statement made it clear that this was a “letter of intent”, not a contract. Months later in NVIDIA’s quarterly results, the agreement is described as “an opportunity to invest in OpenAI.” Not a single dollar has been sent to him, and it is not certain that he will.
The AMD case: 34% rise in the stock market. In October, another mega-deal. amd announced a “definitive” agreement with openAI to deploy 6 GW of data centers. The company indicated that would potentially generate “tens of billions in revenue,” and AMD shares rose 34% in one day. Four months later, in quarterly results from the company, zero mentions of OpenIA. IN November 2025, in AMD’s 10-Q filing, AMD’s outstanding obligations on contracts with a duration greater than one year were 279 million dollars. There were practically no mentions of OpenAI. Many promises, no reality.
The Broadcom case: a confusing order. Broadcom too was going to deploy 10 GW of “AI accelerators designed by OpenAI” at the end of 2029, but at the moment there is still no evidence that chip sales have occurred and there are no clues in OpenAI’s latest quarterly results, which do not mention this agreement anywhere or its impact. Broadcom CEO he did tell investors that they expected to deploy 1 GW of computing in the form of XPUs in 2027, but did not give details of how they planned to reach 10 GW in 2029. And also revealed that “we do not expect much in 2026” from the contract with OpenAI, because the return will focus on 2027, 2028 and 2029.
The Disney case: a very bad sign. The agreement with Disney announced in Decemberincluded the company taking a $1 billion stake and will license more than 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars for use on Sora. It was the type of agreement that validates a company before the general public, especially since Disney does not sign agreements with just anyone. However, the agreement was entirely built on stock warrants, not cash, they point out in Deadline. By abandoning Sora, Disney has withdrawn without consequences and without having transferred a dollar. Another paper agreement.
The SKHynix case: where are we going to get so much memory from?. SK Hynix and Samsung intended to provide 900,000 RAM wafers per month for OpenAI’s Stargate project, but the result of these intentions has been null. That agreement would have consumed 40% of world production of DRAM in the midst of the crisis of this type of components.
The mysterious Norwegian data center case. OpenAI promised in July 2025 that would boost construction of an AI data center belonging to the Stargate project but which would be in Norway. It was then expected that this center would have 100,000 NVIDIA chips by the end of 2026, and that it would expand “significantly” from that figure. There has been no news of this development since then.
Nobody asks questions. Zitron complained in your reflection how financial analysts seemed not to ask the necessary questions when faced with these announcements. He explains that OpenAI had committed about $300 billion in different agreements to create new data centers, but its real income is around $4.5 billion a year and it is expected that it will have losses of about $14 billion in 2026. Despite everything, Zitron criticizes, the stream of advertisements continues to work because it generates increases in the stock market and positive headlines. The difference between contracts and letters of intent was buried in the fine print of the advertisements that almost no one reads.
And the examples continue. In fact, the advertisements do not stop coming despite everything and everyone. OpenAI announced in February an investment of 110 billion dollars by SoftBank (30 billion), NVIDIA (30 billion) and Amazon (50 billion). SoftBank itself is “testing its lending limits” with that bet, which we will see if he can complete. Amazon’s 50 billion are divided in two phases: a first of 15,000 million that should be executed on March 31, and another of 35,000 million dollars whose deadlines depend on several events. Too many agreements that must demonstrate something critical: that they are not made of paper.
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