By Adam Clark
Nvidia and OpenAI are rushing to reassure the market that their relationship is still intact. The two companies are balancing a complicated relationship where their success is intertwined but they don't want to become overreliant on each other.
Questions have been raised about Nvidia and OpenAI's partnership after The Wall Street Journal reported that the chip maker was delaying a planned investment of up to $100 billion in ChatGPT-developer OpenAI. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang subsequently said that the company intends to make a "huge investment" in OpenAI, although he didn't say how much.
The latest development is a Reuters report that OpenAI hasn't been satisfied with some of Nvidia's latest artificial-intelligence chips and is looking to diversify its sources of hardware, seeking alternatives for roughly 10% of its inference needs. Inference is the process of generating answers or results from AI models.
OpenAI didn't immediately respond to a request for comment early on Tuesday. However, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took to social media to smooth things over.
"We love working with NVIDIA and they make the best AI chips in the world. We hope to be a gigantic customer for a very long time. I don't get where all this insanity is coming from," Altman said in a post on social-media platform X.
So what's going on? The likely explanation is negotiation rather than a significant breach between the two companies. OpenAI has struck additional chip-supply deals with Nvidia's rivals, including Advanced Micro Devices, Broadcom and Cerebras Systems in recent months. That makes sense for a company that doesn't want to become overly dependent on a single supplier.
However, Nvidia has plenty of leverage of its own. While the two parties have a memorandum of understanding to build at least 10 gigawatts of computing power, that is set to take years. With OpenAI reportedly planning a huge initial public offering as soon as this year, Nvidia could be taking the chance to signal to its partner that it also has options over where to direct its spending, having recently said it would invest up to $10 billion in AI start-up Anthropic.
If so, OpenAI seems to have got the message. OpenAI infrastructure executive Sachin Katti said the company was "anchoring on Nvidia as the core of our training and inference" in a post on X late on Monday.
Barron's and WSJ owner News Corp has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.
Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 03, 2026 03:38 ET (08:38 GMT)
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