HOW ALTMAN TIED TECH'S BIGGEST PLAYERS TO OΡΕΝΑΙ

Dealmaking blitz has convinced Silicon Valley’s giants to tether fates to his firm, essentially making it too big to fail

- Berber Jin [e-mail]

Jensen Huang was wrapping up a trip celebrating the Lunar New Year in Asia this past January when Masay oshi Son, the chief executive of SoftBank, stood alongside Sam Altman at the White House to unveil what was billed as the largest AI infrastructure project in history.

For almost a decade, the Nvidia chief executive had supplied the AI chips that powered OpenAl's rise. Huang wanted to be the one unveiling such a giant deal with OpenAl's CEO, according to people familiar with his thinking.

Soon after, Nvidia secretly pitched OpenAI on a similar project, offering to effectively sideline SoftBank and help raise the funds needed to build new data centers itself. The talks culminated in a giant $100-billion deal between the two companies, announced at Nvidia's Santa Clara headquarters last month.

"This is the largest computing project in history," Huang said.

Altman might not have intended to give Huang FOMO, or the fear of missing out, but he had that effect. And it is getting contagious.

To achieve his vision of securing seemingly endless computing power for OpenAI, Altman has gone on a dealmaking blitz, playing the egos of Silicon Valley's giants off one another as they raceto cash in on OpenAl's future growth.

The resulting game of financial one-upmanship has tied the fates of the world's biggest semiconductor and cloud compa nies and vast swaths of the U.S. economy-to OpenAl, essentially making it too big to fail. All of them are now betting on the success of a startup that is nowhere near turning a profit and facing a mounting list of business challenges.

Investors aren't bothered.