Just weeks after a $100 billion deal between Nvidia and OpenAI dissolved amid controversy, the chip giant is returning with a tidier proposition: $30 billion in straight equity, no strings attached. The revised arrangement eliminates the chip purchase requirements that drew fierce criticism when the original deal was announced last September.
OpenAI’s forthcoming funding round is set to be historic. The company is expected to raise roughly $100 billion, achieving a valuation of approximately $730 billion — placing it among the most valuable private companies in history. Alongside Nvidia, the round is expected to include Amazon, SoftBank, and Microsoft as participants.
When the original $100 billion deal was announced, it briefly pushed Nvidia’s market cap above $5 trillion and sparked widespread debate about the ethics and logic of circular investment structures in the AI industry. The deal, framed as a “letter of intent,” was later revealed to have never been a binding commitment. OpenAI, it turned out, had been quietly exploring chip alternatives even as the deal was being celebrated publicly.
The new equity-based structure is broadly seen as more sustainable and less prone to conflict-of-interest concerns. Nvidia gets a stake in one of the world’s most valuable AI companies; OpenAI gets capital without being locked into a single chip supplier. Both parties benefit without the circular logic that made the previous deal so contentious.
Still, OpenAI’s challenges are formidable. Its ChatGPT market share has dropped from 86.7% to 64.5% in a year, and it is now trailing Anthropic in enterprise software — a segment where the margins and loyalty tend to be far stickier than in the consumer market. With cash continuing to flow out and advertising experiments drawing competitive fire, the pressure on OpenAI to find a clear path to profitability has never been greater.