Nvidia CEO says $100B OpenAI deal is off, cites IPO
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has stated that the idea for Nvidia to spend up to $100 billion in OpenAI is no longer on the table. He claims that OpenAI’s pursuit for an IPO is a big reason why the megadeal won’t materialise as planned.
What Huang actually said
While speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom conference, Huang stated that a billion dollar investment in OpenAI isn’t happening “anymore” as the ChatGPT creator is now gearing up to go public later this year. Instead, Nvidia was able to secure a billion dollar investment in OpenAI as part of its massive funding round that also included billion dollars from Amazon and billion dollars from SoftBank. Huang characterized this billion investment as probably Nvidia’s final opportunity to invest at scale in a company of OpenAI’s significance.
How the $100B plan came about
News of the billion dollar Nvidia–OpenAI tie‑up has its genesis in September 2025, when the two companies announced a letter of intent for Nvidia to deliver not less than 10 gigawatts of AI infrastructure and potentially commit to invest up to billion dollars over several years. That agreement was never a binding contract, and Nvidia disclosed several times in filings that there was “no assurance” that any investment would proceed on the anticipated terms, or at all. Internally, Nvidia executives also framed the billion figure as aspirational and tied to performance targets and market trends.
Why the megadeal fizzled
By early 2026, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters and others reported that negotiations had stalled over concerns within Nvidia about the size of financing, how it would be structured and its circular nature. The wisdom of anchoring such a massive capital commitment to one customer who would then spend most of that money back with Nvidia for its GPUs, plus boom-and-bust history in markets like crypto, was questioned by some at Nvidia. All the while, OpenAI also was quietly pursuing alternative chip suppliers and broader sources of funding, making the case for a single, gigantic Nvidia‑centric deal all the more tenuous.
Role of the OpenAI IPO
OpenAI’s determination to pursue an IPO this year is a key component of Huang’s latest comments about the billion deal being dead. Once OpenAI is a public company with its shareholder base widely held, regulators and investors are likely to give special scrutiny to any outsized strategic stake by a key supplier like Nvidia, raising antitrust and governance questions. Huang indicated the upcoming listing basically sets a ceiling on how much equity Nvidia can realistically absorb, with billion investment being more the justifiable cap than the first of many billion allocations.
What this means for Nvidia, OpenAI, and AI markets
Even without the megadeal, Nvidia and OpenAI are irremediably intertwined: openai.com still presumes to call Nvidia its leading compute partner for training and running frontier models. For Nvidia, going from a headline billion number that catches the eye to a big but finite billion stake reduces financial concentration risk while allowing it to maintain chip sales growth as AI demand expands across various clients. For OpenAI, the shift away from a singular monstrous Nvidia package keeps its options ajar: it can access public markets, mingle among suppliers like AMD and others, and avoid being viewed as financially tethered to one hardware vendor as the AI arms race heats up.