AI Investment Is Starting to Look Like a Slush Fund

Summary

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images No two companies are as important to the recent AI boom as OpenAI and Nvidia. OpenAI’s journey from research lab to chatbot juggernaut reoriented the entire tech industry around the thesis that large-language models will change everything. Nvidia’s chips have been almost synonymous with scaling, on which OpenAI and others are collectively spending hundreds of billions of dollars. For the last few years, the companies’ fortunes have been aligned, and their relationship has been, for the most part, an obvious one: OpenAI, which has become one of the biggest start-ups in the world, is a major customer for Nvidia, which has become the largest public company in the world. In 2025, their twin trajectories have left much of the rest of the economy behind, and their stated ambitions — necessary to keep the momentum going — have become extreme. In a recent blog post, Sam Altman said his company wanted to “create a factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week” to “maybe” be able to “figure out how to cure cancer” or “provide customized tutoring to every student on Earth.” OpenAI hasn’t had any trouble raising money so far, but when your investment projections start crossing into the trillions, financing starts to get tricky, particularly if you aren’t a company like Google or Meta, with an existing business throwing off tens of billions of dollars a year. Which might help explain this: OpenAI and NVIDIA today announced a letter of intent for a landmark strategic partnership to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems for OpenAI’s next-generation AI infrastructure to train and run its next generation of models on the path to deploying superintelligence. To support this deployment including data center and power capacity, NVIDIA intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as the new NVIDIA systems are deployed. Emphasis mine! The issue of circular financing in the AI world has been bubbli...