Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has dramatically reset investor expectations around the company’s OpenAI investment, clarifying that the “$100 billion” figure was “never a commitment.”
Speaking to reporters in Taipei on Sunday, Huang revealed the figure came from a letter of intent describing an invitation to invest “up to” that amount.
He said that Nvidia will instead evaluate funding rounds “one step at a time.”
The reversal, signaled by WSJ reporting that the original September megadeal had stalled due to internal doubts, sent Nvidia stock (NVDA) into premarket losses.
Nvidia stock: Market resets around smaller exposure
Nvidia’s stock fell roughly 2% in early premarket trading on Monday, with shares trading near $188, down from its close of $192 on Friday.
The modest but tangible decline reflects a recalibration of investor expectations around both capital exposure and demand visibility.
The original September announcement, when Huang stood alongside Sam Altman to unveil 10 gigawatts of planned infrastructure, triggered a 4% stock pop.
The phrasing matters, as investors had mentally priced in a massive, long-term revenue stream locked in via an eight-figure equity check.
A $100 billion investment would have signaled a significant balance-sheet commitment and guaranteed GPU demand for a decade or more.
By walking it back to “huge but not $100 billion,” Huang shifted the narrative from certainty to optionality.
Instead of a binding capex anchor, it’s now a probability play, and Nvidia will likely participate in OpenAI’s current funding round at a fraction of the headline figure.
Wall Street framing has grown more cautious.
Morgan Stanley reiterated its “Overweight” rating with a $250 price target, while Bernstein maintained “Buy” at $275, though both are banking on Nvidia’s structural dominance in AI accelerators.
The consensus message is that Nvidia’s chips will remain foundational to AI, but the OpenAI relationship is no longer a revenue moonshot.
Circular financing doubts
The stalled megadeal also resurrects a gnawing concern on Wall Street: circular financing.
When a chip supplier invests billions in its own customers so those customers can buy more chips, it blurs the line between genuine demand and vendor-engineered revenue.
Huang privately cited concerns about OpenAI’s “lack of discipline” and competitive threats from Google and Anthropic, code for doubts about whether the original scale made sense.
Nvidia has already committed $2 billion to CoreWeave and up to $10 billion to Anthropic, both major chip buyers.
Short sellers like Jim Chanos have drawn parallels to Enron-era vendor financing schemes, warning that overinvestment in customers could mask brittle demand if orders stall.
Huang called the friction reports “nonsense” and insisted Nvidia will still “make a huge investment” in OpenAI, likely the largest the company has ever made.
But the backpedal signals an internal reckoning: even Nvidia’s fortress balance sheet has limits on how much it can pre-finance a customer’s AI dreams.
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