Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI Inc., during a media tour of the Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas, US, on Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2025.
Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Talk about bad timing. OpenAI’s first Stargate development to come online — a data center in Texas that’s stuffed to the brims with Oracle and Nvidia infrastructure — did so just as investors started questioning the sustainability of the artificial intelligence firm’s trajectory.
Shares of Nvidia and Oracle, the major players in OpenAI’s push to establish data centers that are essentially the heart of ChatGPT, fell Tuesday. Their moves were all the starker when compared with their spikes on the previous day, when Nvidia and OpenAI jointly announced their $100 billion partnership.
Some questions that investors appeared to be asking: Where’s all that power needed to keep the data centers running — approximately the output of 17 nuclear plants — going to come from? Is Nvidia’s investment in OpenAI — which essentially gives the company money to buy its chips — uncannily similar to what happened during the 2000s Dotcom bubble?
Adding to those concerns was U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s statement that “by many measures, for example, equity prices are fairly highly valued.” Additionally, Powell raised concerns that there could be signs of stagflation — persistent inflation amid a flagging labor market — in the U.S. economy.
That combination of events might make OpenAI CEO Sam Altman feel like the bride getting outshone on her wedding day. Or maybe not. Altman acknowledged that “people are worried” — “but this is what it takes.” Besides, that bride still has many suitors, waving billion-dollar checks at her.
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And finally…
An electronic board displays a share price of the Nikkei index of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in Tokyo on March 4, 2024. (Photo by Kazuhiro NOGI / AFP) (Photo by KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP via Getty Images)
Kazuhiro Nogi | Afp | Getty Images
Japan shares keep breaking records as reforms, foreign inflows outweigh political risks
Japanese equities are extending record highs, fueled by steady inflows from foreign investors and governance reforms.
The country is finally exiting its “lost decades” of deflation, said Kei Okamura, Neuberger Berman’s MD and Japanese equities portfolio manager. Real wages and household consumption have eked out a fragile recovery, while inflation is stabilizing around the Bank of Japan’s 2% target, and the yen has largely steadied after last year’s plunge to 160 per dollar.
— Lee Ying Shan