In late September, Nvidia announced plans to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI to fund a new generation of data centers, while OpenAI pledged to purchase millions of Nvidia chips for those facilities. Days later, OpenAI struck a similar multibillion-dollar arrangement with AMD. Celebrated by investors, these deals also raised eyebrows. To some observers, they looked eerily like the circular financing arrangements of the late 1990s, when vendors and clients reinforced each other’s valuations without generating real value. Bloomberg aptly described the pattern as an “increasingly complex and interconnected web of business transactions” fueling a trillion-dollar AI boom.
