Nvidia has curtailed its direct financial commitments to OpenAI, slashing a planned infrastructure guarantee from $250 billion to just under $120 billion. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the retreat follows explicit pushback from institutional investors alarmed by the semiconductor vendor's mounting exposure to concentrated customer risk and circular balance-sheet financing.
The revised guarantee underwrites the initial phase of an infrastructure deployment targeting roughly 5 gigawatts of capacity. In parallel, OpenAI continues independent lease negotiations for a 10-gigawatt installation under development by SoftBank subsidiary SB Energy. Separate from these facility-level commitments, Nvidia remains in talks to finance dedicated chip purchases valued at up to $350 billion.
Nvidia halving its risk under investor pressure could be read as a sign that even the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom are growing more cautious.
When the dominant hardware vendor begins gating its own balance sheet, the broader narrative around unlimited vendor-financed data center expansion loses credibility. For enterprise leadership, this marks a tangible shift: infrastructure commitments are being broken down into milestone-based tranches rather than blank-check guarantees.
Anthropic Expansion Complicates Market Verdict
While hardware financiers pull back on open-ended guarantees, enterprise revenue data shows aggressive software-layer traction elsewhere. Anthropic generated more than double its prior quarter's revenue, moving from $4.73 billion in the first quarter to surpass $11.5 billion in the second quarter, according to figures reported by Reuters—a 14-fold surge year-over-year.
Anthropic stated it grew revenue by more than 10x in each of the three years leading into early 2026, with internal targets pointing toward $190 billion to $200 billion by 2028. That multi-year projection eclipses the roughly $45 billion annualized run rate cited in May. Backed by these numbers, Anthropic is preparing for a public offering targeted at an enterprise valuation near $1 trillion by late September or early October, even as telemetry from corporate spend tracker Ramp indicates a slight flattening in token consumption among mid-market enterprise accounts.
The initial vision of an uninterrupted, self-funding $250 billion infrastructure pipeline has collided with basic capital discipline. Under pressure from public equity markets, chipmakers are replacing unilateral mega-guarantees with phased, risk-adjusted infrastructure tiers.