OpenAI's Sam Altman has put himself in the center of the tech universe through a series of mammoth deals.
OpenAI's aggressive dealmaking has helped drive the stock market to record highs even though the company is still private and burning billions of dollars in cash. The $500 billion artificial intelligence startup has inked mammoth agreements with Nvidia, Oracle and CoreWeave, among others.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks to media following a Q&A at the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.in July as part of the the Stargate program, a $500 billion infrastructure project that's also being funded byWhile OpenAI says that scaling is key to driving innovation and future AI breakthroughs, investors and analysts are beginning to raise their eyebrows over the mindboggling sums, as well as OpenAI's reliance on an increasingly interconnected web of infrastructure partners.funding round in October. Oracle is spending about $40 billion on Nvidia chips to power one of OpenAI's Stargate data centers, according to a May report from the OpenAI is only expected to generate $13 billion in revenue this year, according to the company's CFO Sarah Friar. She"When the internet was getting started, people kept feeling like, 'Oh, we're over-building, there's too much,'" Friar said. "Look where we are today, right?"Nvidia has been the biggest winner of the AI boom so far because it produces the graphics processing units that are necessary to train models and run large AI workloads. Nvidia's investment in OpenAI, which will be paid out in installments over several years, will help the startup build out data centers that are based around its GPUs. "You don't have to be a skeptic about AI technology's promise in general to see this announcement as a troubling signal about how self-referential the entire space has become," Bespoke Investment Group wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday. "If NVDA has to provide the capital that becomes its revenues in order to maintain growth, the whole ecosystem may be unsustainable."Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at One Point BFG Wealth Partners, said names of companies from the late 1990′s were ringing in his ears after the OpenAI-Nvidia deal was announced. A key difference, however, is that this transaction is "so much bigger in terms of dollars," he wrote in a note. "For this whole massive experiment to work without causing large losses, OpenAI and its peers now have got to generate huge revenues and profits to pay for all the obligations they are signing up for and at the same time provide a return to its investors," Boockvar said. An OpenAI spokesperson referred CNBC to comments from Altman and Friar this week, adding that the company is pursuing "a once-in-a-century opportunity that demands ambition equal to the moment." The total amount of demand for compute could reach a staggering 200 gigawatts by 2030, according to Bain & Company's. Building enough data centers to meet this anticipated demand would cost about $500 billion a year, meaning AI companies would have to generate a combined $2 trillion in annual revenue to cover those costs. Even if companies throw their whole weight behind investing in the cloud and data centers, "the amount would still fall $800 billion short of the revenue needed to fund the full investment," Bain said."This is what it takes to deliver AI," Altman told CNBC. "Unlike previous technological revolutions or previous versions of the internet, there's so much infrastructure that's required, and this is a small sample of it."
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