Is Nvidia's OpenAI financing deal circular risk?

Nvidia guaranteeing $250 billion so OpenAI can lease a data centre isn't new territory for the two companies; it's the third time in under a year Nvidia has restructured how it bankrolls its biggest customer, and each version has drawn sharper scrutiny than the last.

The relationship began in September 2025 with a letter of intent for Nvidia to commit up to $100 billion to OpenAI's infrastructure build-out. By February 2026, chief executive Jensen Huang had walked that figure back, calling it "never a commitment".

What materialised instead was a $30 billion equity stake in OpenAI's $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion valuation, far short of the original number. The newly reported $250 billion guarantee, tied to a 10-gigawatt Ohio data centre, marks a third structural approach: debt support rather than equity.

According to the OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar, the funds raised by the company are primarily used for acquiring GPUs from Nvidia.

In this recent case, Nvidia has practically agreed to guarantee the capability of OpenAI to make such payments, in essence, underwriting the ability of the chipmaker's own customer to make further purchases of its chips.

As noted by Bernstein's analyst Stacy Rasgon back in September 2025, the Nvidia investments into OpenAI would “clearly fuel circular concerns", since the company had already invested in more than 50 venture capital projects for AI firms in that year, some of which were using those funds to purchase equipment from Nvidia.

The Nvidia short-seller Michael Burry responded to the news by saying merely that history is repeating itself once again.