Nvidia says no assurance $100bn OpenAI deal will be finalised

In its quarterly filing accompanying record earnings, Nvidia disclosed that its September letter of intent to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI had not been converted into a binding agreement, stating: “there is no assurance that we will enter into definitive agreements with respect to the OpenAI opportunity.” The letter of intent had always been described by both companies as non-binding pending further negotiation, so the disclosure did not contradict earlier statements, but it was the first time Nvidia had put the deal’s uncertain status in a formal SEC filing rather than in the framing language used at announcement.

The disclosure surfaced two months after the original announcement, and in the same filing in which Nvidia reported that cloud GPUs were “sold out” and data-centre revenue had grown 66% year on year, an apparent tension between confidence in near-term demand and caution about the largest single commitment in its published pipeline. Jensen Huang nonetheless continued to describe OpenAI in strongly positive terms, separately calling the company “once-in-a-generation.”

The filing became a reference point in the wider argument over whether AI infrastructure spending, much of it structured through interlocking non-binding commitments between a small number of companies — chipmakers investing in the labs that buy their chips, labs committing to compute they had not yet secured financing for — was outrunning demonstrated, contracted revenue. It arrived the same week as Michael Burry’s disclosed short position against Nvidia, giving sceptics of the AI capital-spending cycle a concrete document to cite alongside more general warnings about a bubble.