Enterprise Weekly #531: OpenAI's Week of Partnerships, Circular Revenue Flows, and More
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Circles. That word perfectly captures the self-reinforcing capital flows happening between AI behemoths.
Earlier this week, NVIDIA announced that they will invest up to $100B in OpenAI to support a datacenter buildout, with NVIDIA’s very chips equipping those data centers. While NVIDIA has made investments in many startups for similar strategic reasons (they participated in 50 venture deals in 2024 and are on pace to top that this year, according to Pitchbook), no investment has reached this magnitude.
This wasn’t the only OpenAI deal that made headlines this week. They also recently announced deals with Databricks and CoreWeave:
Databricks has committed to spend $100M over multiple years with OpenAI, with the data giant making it easier for customers to connect their data with OpenAI models.
CoreWeave announced a $6.5B deal with OpenAI, to provide AI datacenters and technology. This is especially interesting given the NVIDIA deal in parallel and NVIDIA’s heavy backing of CoreWeave, owning 5% of the company’s stock (this is circular as well, given that CoreWeave is an AI cloud provider building with NVIDIA chips).
Despite the circular concerns (NVIDIA’s investment being spent on purchases of NVIDIA chips), this is also smart business strategy from NVIDIA. They don’t want to be reliant on the hyperscalers for distribution, especially given that they themselves are making moves to build out their AI infrastructure. This deal may just be one of many expressions of AI conviction from the NVIDIA team. As Jensen said on the day of the investment was announced:
“We’re literally going to connect intelligence to every application, to every use case, to every device — and we’re just at the beginning. This is the first 10 gigawatts, I assure you of that.”
If Jensen is onto something and this is just the beginning of a lot more infrastructure built for AI, entrepreneurs should be ready to fully embrace the explosion of compute and subsequent increase in model capabilities.
Many have questioned if the fundamentals of these investments will hold up? AI may be transformative, but is $100B worth it? When will the ROI truly come? Only time will tell how the fundamentals hold up, but one thing remains true: we believe the biggest beneficiaries of this AI wave will be ambitious founders applying AI to reshape their industries.
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📚 Read more news:
WSJ: Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?
TechCrunch: OpenAI says GPT-5 stacks up to humans in a wide range of jobs
VentureBeat: The $100M OpenAI partnership is nice, but Databricks’ real breakthrough makes AI up to 90x cheaper
🧵 Read more threads:
Jon Lehr: Your Biggest Competitor 90 Days From Now May Not Even Exist Yet
Proby Shandilya: Durable Execution - Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop 😎
James Cadwallader: ChatGPT Collapsing the Funnel
Tanay Jaipuria: Claude 4.1 Opus as Most Valuable Public Model
Anshu Sharma: MCP Security Report
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