Catenaa, Monday, July 27, 2026- Nvidia is working on a fresh round of AI deals worth more than $750 billion, accelerating investments that increase concerns among investors.
A partnership with South Korean conglomerate SK Group unveiled late Friday means the companies will be doing more than $500 billion in business with each other, Nvidia said.
The world’s most valuable company is also in talks to backstop as much as $250 billion to help OpenAI lease computing power from a US data center project in what would be among the chipmaker’s biggest financing deals with a customer.
Big names from Goldman Sachs Group to investor Michael Burry of “Big Short” fame have for months warned of the “circular” nature of such agreements, where Nvidia finances and takes stakes in companies and projects that use its chips.
And yet, the pace of the deals is only quickening. The fear with these transactions is that they may skew demand, spur bad decision-making and magnify losses if AI fails to turn profits for those investing hundreds of billions of dollars in the technology.
Nvidia is also in discussions to finance $350 billion of OpenAI’s purchases of its chips for the US project, Bloomberg News reports.
And on Monday, the company said it has made a “substantial” investment in Safe Superintelligence, the AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.
Nvidia’s shares fell as much as 5.3% in New York trading on Monday to $195.92. And the cost of protecting Nvidia’s debt against default surged by the most on record, gaining by as much as about 0.14 percentage point to as high as around 0.82 percentage point a year.
“Nvidia wants to make sure that the buildout continues at this pace,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mandeep Singh said on Bloomberg Television. “That’s a big risk for Nvidia. If things take a pause, even if it’s for six months, that’s not going to go very well for them.”
Nvidia’s latest moves add to a frenzy of deals that it has made across the ecosystem over the past couple of years. The dominant maker of AI processors has taken stakes in developers such as OpenAI and fellow chipmakers like Marvell Technology, in an effort to fuel industrywide growth.
Industry peers are opting for similar arrangements. Google, whose AI entries include Gemini, agreed to backstop lease payments at five data center locations for Anthropic, helping the OpenAI rival obtain what amounts to a $35 billion loan.
Such transactions have left many AI companies increasingly intertwined, leaving the industry exposed to systemic shocks. Among the central concerns is also the industry’s rising debt levels, with many AI companies boosting borrowing to fund their data center and chip projects.
