The steel frame of data centers under construction during a tour of the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.
Shelby Tauber | Reuters
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, 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. That bride still has many suitors, waving billion-dollar checks at her.
What you need to know today
And finally…
Qin Zihang | Visual China Group | Getty Images
Altman, Huang and the last-minute negotiations that sealed the $100 billion OpenAI-Nvidia deal
Through a series of hurried negotiations, late-night calls and last-minute contract tweaks, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang struck a $100 billion partnership on Monday — hours before Altman boarded his flight to Abilene, Texas, to unveil his company’s next big infrastructure push.
Altman and Huang negotiated their pact largely through a mix of virtual discussions and one-on-one meetings in London, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., with no bankers involved, according to people close to the talks who declined to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
— MacKenzie Sigalos