Nvidia reportedly plans to invest $30bn in OpenAI’s next funding round

. UK edition

Screens showing a photograph of Jensen Huang, graphics cards and the Nvidia logo
Screens displaying a photograph of Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, in Toulouse, France. Photograph: Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images

Chip manufacturer to invest in return for stock after previous ‘circular’ $100bn deal dissolved earlier this month

Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, is reportedly planning to invest $30bn (£22bn) in OpenAI’s next funding round, after a $100bn deal between the two dissolved earlier this month.

The maker of ChatGPT is expected to be valued at $730bn in the funding round, almost twice the valuation of Anthropic, one of its main rivals, which raised $30bn earlier this month.

Nvidia’s announcement of a $100bn investment in OpenAI last September drove the chipmaker’s stock to more than $5tn and led to fervent discussion about circular deals between the largest players in artificial intelligence.

The investment, which the chipmaker framed as a “letter of intent”, would have involved Nvidia giving OpenAI money to buy and deploy its chips for its AI infrastructure.

That all appeared to change earlier this month, when reports surfaced that Nvidia’s intent was never a firm commitment – and OpenAI was looking elsewhere for chips to power its systems. The news shook markets, which were already febrile over concerns that AI agents would replace jobs and decimate the market for global software companies.

In the new arrangement, Nvidia will invest in OpenAI in return for its stock, with no commensurate commitment for OpenAI to buy its chips.

OpenAI’s next funding round will reportedly raise about $100bn and involve investments from Amazon, SoftBank and Microsoft, the Financial Times reported. The expected $730bn valuation would put the maker of ChatGPT just behind SpaceX as one of the world’s most valuable privately held companies.

However, questions remain over its ability to turn a sustainable profit out of its sky-high investment, especially given that it is burning through cash while losing market share to competitors. ChatGPT’s market share has declined from 86.7% to 64.5% in the past year, and it is now trailing Anthropic in the market for enterprise software.

OpenAI has started to test ads targeted to users of ChatGPT, but it is unclear if this is a clear path to profit – and resulted in Anthropic, its rival, attacking the practice in a series of high-profile advertisements earlier this month.

SoftBank, one of OpenAI’s main backers, said on an earnings call last week that “nothing has been decided” on the subject of its anticipated forthcoming investment in OpenAI, although it made billions of dollars last year on its current holdings in the company.

Meanwhile, OpenAI appears to be diversifying beyond Nvidia’s graphics processing units, announcing deals with rival chipmakers including AMD and Broadcom.

At least one of those deals also has a question hanging over it, however, after Broadcom’s chief executive, Hock Tan, told investors in December that the company did “not expect much in 2026” over the OpenAI investment.