High-profile partnerships with tech giants like Oracle, Nvidia, CoreWeave, and AMD have pushed the value of OpenAI's dealmaking above $1 trillion this year alone. On Monday, the company added Amazon to its list of partners in the AI arms race.
The ChatGPT maker has signed a string of blockbuster computing deals with other tech companies to power its AI infrastructure. The deals give OpenAI access to vast computing power, but the ultimate cost for the company could be staggering.
Here's the breakdown of its $1 trillion worth of deals:
- Nvidia: $500 billion
- Oracle: $300 billion
- AMD: $270 billion
- Amazon: $38 billion
- CoreWeave: $22 billion
And while it's true that OpenAI's revenue projections have been growing, the huge sticker price on these infrastructure deals still dwarfs those figures.
Some analysts have flagged this gap between the dollar value of OpenAI's commitments and the amount of money the ChatGPT maker is actually bringing in.
When CoreWeave signed a $14 billion deal with Meta to provide it with AI compute in September, analysts at DA Davidson wrote that the deal represented a bullish diversification for CoreWeave away from OpenAI, noting that "Since OpenAI does not yet have the capital or cash flow to live up to those commitments, that makes their backlog to CoreWeave seem somewhat speculative."
"OpenAI is in no position to make any of these commitments," DA Davidson's Gil Luria told the FT.
OpenAI has projected that it will burn through $155 billion in cash due to the massive spending required to power its AI infrastructure needs. This number is an $80 billion increase from the previous cash burn projections.
Still, the AI titan is a true whale in the market. Its moves lately have swung whole sectors as well as individual stocks, with AMD's big pop on Monday just the latest example.
Last week, SaaS stocks like Salesforce, Docusign, and others sold off after OpenAI unveiled internal tools that spooked investors.
