NVidia’s $100 Billion OpenAI Investment Stalls

Cracks are continuing to form on the AI bubble as NVidia’s $100 billion OpenAI investment reportedly stalls.

Generative AI has long been a solution look for a problem. As a result, public buy-in has been a critical and longstanding problem for AI companies struggling to justify their investments. Because of that, you are continuing to see companies shove AI into more and more products people actually use in a desperate bid to show investors that people are, in fact, buying into the products. The pathetic reality is the fact that the companies are struggling to just give these products away for free, let alone get huge volumes of people to subscribe to services for premium prices.

While there are those who are desperately holding onto the idea that AI is still the next industrial revolution, the reality of a massive investment bubble continues to get more and more, well, real. For instance, OpenAI internal documents admit that the company stands to lose a whopping $14 billion this year alone. Hardly the ‘worth x number of Amazons’ that have long been promised.

What’s more, this is not even the only crack forming on the obviously fake sales job of AI being a ‘once in a generation’ investment opportunity. Another story is surfacing that says that NVidia’s $100 billion OpenAI investment has reportedly stalled. From Sherwood:

The Wall Street Journal dropped a bombshell on Friday evening, reporting that Nvidia’s plan to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI “has stalled after some inside the chip giant expressed doubts about the deal, people familiar with the matter said.”

In September, the two sides announced a nonbinding letter of intent that would see OpenAI lease chips from Nvidia (NVDA $185.00 (-2.85%)) as the parties build out 10 gigawatts of computing power, with the chip designer investing in the ChatGPT maker “progressively as each gigawatt is deployed.”

This weekend, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told the press that the $100 billion OpenAI investment was “never a commitment,” effectively confirming this report.

The WSJ indicated that Huang “has also privately criticized what he has described as a lack of discipline in OpenAI’s business approach and expressed concern about the competition it faces from the likes of Google and Anthropic, some of the people said.”

The simple takeaway here: Nvidia wants the world to know that it is not going to be overreliant on OpenAI.

Yeah, so much for the whole image of people throwing money at pretty much any company into AI. We’re seeing the image of companies saying, “look, AI isn’t everything these days, OK?” This is reality beginning to sink in that AI has always been over hyped and under delivered.

Indeed, one excellent example of companies struggling to think of anything to sell their AI is Razer’s AI waifu in a bottle. From Engadget:

Last year Razer showed off Project Ava as a digital assistant that lived inside your computer to help adjust settings or provide gaming tips. But now at CES 2026, the company’s AI companion platform has gotten a major glow-up while moving into some new digs.

Now, in lieu of being constrained entirely to your PC’s screen, Razer has given Project Ava a real home in the form of a small tube that can display a 5.5-inch animated hologram of the AI’s avatar. You’ll still need to connect it to your computer via USB-C to provide Ava with the power and data it needs. However, all of your companion’s other components are built into its abode, including dual far-field mics so you can talk to it, a down-firing full-range speaker so it can talk and an HD camera with an ambient light sensor so the AI can see and react to its surroundings.

But perhaps the biggest upgrade to the project is that instead of just Ava, who Razer describes as “a calm, reliable source of energy to help you keep things clear, efficient, and always on point,” there are three or four new personas (depending on how we’re counting) joining the roster. Kira looks like a TikTok e-girl decked out in a frilly outfit complete with Razer neon green accents, while Zane is her edgy masculine alternative who kind of reminds me of the Giga Chad meme, but with extra snake tattoos. Then there’s Sao, who appears to be directly inspired by iconic Japanese salary woman Saori Araki. Finally, there’s an avatar made in the likeness of Faker (Lee Sang-hyeok), the most successful and well-known League of Legends player of all time and one of Razer’s sponsored esports athletes.

Seriously, who is asking for this? At most, people already have digital assistants like Alexa. It’s already difficult to find time to concentrate on the game you are working on with daily interruptions. Do you really want some bottled AI chirping spoilers at you every couple of minutes on top of it all? As far as mass appeal is concerned, this is easily one of the more useless products a company has ever come up with.

Still, it really shows just how desperate companies are getting to sell their AI products as they struggle to justify their massive investments. It’s already bad enough that AI is being shoved into everything in a bid to sell the product to consumers, but it’s even worse when companies go to extreme lengths to ensure that it’s extremely difficult to either ignore or uninstall on top of it all. The sooner people realize that AI is little more than a giant money pit, the better.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.