Sam Altman has a ‘don’t be mad’ message for everyone saying Nvidia is …
Sam Altman has defended OpenAI’s partnership with Nvidia, saying that the AI company “loves working” with the chip maker. Sharing a post on X, Altman described Nvidia’s chips as “the best AI chips in the world.” He added that OpenAI hopes to remain a “gigantic customer” of the chip maker for a long time. “We love working with NVIDIA and they make the best AI chips in the world. We hope to be a gigantic customer for a very long time,” Sam Altman said adding “I don’t get where all this insanity is coming from”. Sam Altman’s comments come amid growing market speculation around OpenAI’s long-term computing strategy and reports suggesting that Nvidia may be reassessing the pace of its investments linked to OpenAI.
Concerns raised over Nvidia-OpenAI deal
In September 2025, Nvidia announced to make a planned investment of $100 billion in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. In a joint announcement, OpenAI President Greg Brockman and Jensen Huang called the deal “the largest computing project in history.” The deal was expected to close within weeks, however, negotiations have dragged on for months. But, a Wall Street Journal report recently said that the talks have been stalled after some inside the chip giant expressed doubts about the deal. The report quotes people familiar with the matter who said that Huang has privately pointed to growing competition from companies such as Google and Anthropic. More pointedly, he has reportedly criticised what he sees as a lack of discipline in OpenAI’s business approach and raised concerns about growing competition from Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude.Speaking to reporters outside a Taipei restaurant on January 31, Nvidia CEP Jensen Huang said “Yes, Nvidia will invest in OpenAI. Yes, it’ll be big. But $100 billion? “No, no, nothing like that.”
Jensen Huang’s u-turn on OpenAI
A day later, Huang took a u-turn. “It was never a commitment,” he told reporters on February 1. “They invited us to invest up to $100 billion and of course, we were very happy and honored that they invited us, but we will invest one step at a time”.Huang also brushed off a report of tension with OpenAI, saying the idea was “nonsense” and that Nvidia planned a huge investment in OpenAI.
Possible reason behind tension between OpenAI and Nvidia
As per a Reuters report , “Nvidia’s graphics processing chips are well-suited for massive data crunching necessary to train large AI models like ChatGPT that have underpinned the explosive growth of AI globally to date. But AI advancements increasingly focus on using trained models for inference and reasoning, which could be a new, bigger stage of AI, inspiring OpenAI’s efforts. The ChatGPT-maker’s search for GPU alternatives since last year focused on companies building chips with large amounts of memory embedded in the same piece of silicon as the rest of the chip, called SRAM. Squishing as much costly SRAM as possible onto each chip can offer speed advantages for chatbots and other AI systems as they crunch requests from millions of users.” Last year, OpenAI struck deals with AMD and others for GPUs built to rival Nvidia’s. In fact, sources say OpenAI’s deal with AMD didn’t go very well with partner Nvidia.This AI inference has become the new front in the competition. The decision by OpenAI and others to seek out alternatives in the inference chip market marks a significant test of Nvidia’s AI dominance and comes at a time when the two companies are in investment talks.
