Nvidia is walking back the size of its commitment to OpenAI’s massive data center buildout, and the reason is about as clear a signal as you’ll get in this market. The chipmaker had reportedly planned to guarantee $250 billion for the project. Now, under pressure from its own investors, that number drops to just under $120 billion for the first construction phase, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The scaled-back guarantee covers roughly five gigawatts of capacity. OpenAI is separately negotiating a lease for the full 10-gigawatt project being developed by SB Energy, the SoftBank subsidiary. Nvidia is also in talks on separate financing for OpenAI’s chip purchases that could reach $350 billion. So the overall relationship isn’t shrinking — but the structure of risk is changing. Investors don’t want Nvidia carrying that much exposure on its balance sheet.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Critics of the AI boom will point to this as evidence the bubble is deflating. Fair enough — when the biggest beneficiary of the AI gold rush halves its guaranteed exposure at the first sign of investor pushback, that’s a data point. But Anthropic’s numbers tell a completely different story. The company’s revenue more than doubled in a single quarter, jumping from $4.73 billion in Q1 to over $11.5 billion in Q2. That’s a 14x increase year over year. Anthropic reportedly projects revenue of $190 billion to $200 billion by 2028, which dwarfs the $45 billion annual run rate it shared in May.
So which signal do you trust? Nvidia de-risking, or Anthropic printing revenue? The truth is probably that both are rational. Nvidia’s investors are hedging against concentration risk, not against AI demand itself. Meanwhile, Anthropic is reportedly planning an IPO near a $1 trillion valuation in late September or early October. One wrinkle worth watching: financial services firm Ramp recently measured a slight flattening in demand for Anthropic tokens among its business customers. If enterprise adoption plateaus even as revenue projections soar, someone’s math is off. The next six months will tell us whose.
