The so-called $100 billion financing is essentially a self-rescue &#34;blood supply&#34; that tech giants have to undertake to prevent the AI bubble from bursting.
On February 4th, according to Ken Brown, a senior reporter at The Information, OpenAI is raising up to $100 billion in financing. NVIDIA may plan to invest $30 billion, Amazon $20 billion, SoftBank $30 billion, and Microsoft $10 billion.
Under OpenAI's outrageous valuation of $730 billion, why are these smart people rushing to give money? In Brown's view, the logic is very straightforward.
<h2>Banks no longer trust OpenAI, so the giants have to step in</h2>
In the past, OpenAI was smart; it didn't borrow money itself but let partners like Oracle, CoreWeave, and Vantage Data Centers use their own balance sheets to borrow money to build data centers, with OpenAI paying later through contracts.
OpenAI essentially &#34;painted a pie,&#34; and partners took the pie to the bank to exchange for loans. However, this strategy now faces significant market resistance. Ken Brown pointed out:
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&#34;Investors have indicated that they are willing to provide loans to companies relying on OpenAI to pay future bills are limited.&#34;
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Now, investors in the bond market have also woken up. They realize that OpenAI is burning cash too quickly and will not be able to pay rent in the future. As a result, investors have raised the financing costs for companies like Oracle, even treating their bonds as &#34;junk bonds.&#34;
They realize that if OpenAI's future cash flow cannot cover these debts, the partners acting as &#34;contractors&#34; will face default risks. As the report states:
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&#34;This strategy may no longer be applicable or may become very expensive.&#34;
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The ironic reality is that Oracle, in order to raise funds, has even been forced to announce it will sell stock to make up the difference, directly heightening market anxiety. Mike Talaga, head of credit research at Janus Henderson, bluntly stated:
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&#34;Oracle is actually willing to dilute equity to raise funds, which has surprised the market.&#34;
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Wall Street Journal mentioned yesterday that in the face of Oracle's massive AI infrastructure financing needs, Wall Street banks' balance sheets are nearing their limits. To mitigate risk exposure and free up capacity for continued lending, banks are eager to &#34;securitize&#34; and sell the hundreds of billions of dollars in loans related to Oracle's data center projects to insurance companies and private credit funds.
And when banks stop lending to OpenAI's &#34;contractors,&#34; the construction of OpenAI's data centers will have to halt.
<h2>But why are tech giants willing to be the &#34;backers&#34;?</h2>
When external financing channels tighten, tech giants can no longer sit idly by. If the data centers stop, OpenAI won't be able to train models; without training models, it won't need NVIDIA's chips or Microsoft's cloud services
Thus, this $100 billion financing has turned into &#34;revolving financing&#34;:
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Microsoft is providing funds to secure that $250 billion Azure cloud order. Microsoft holds about 27% equity in OpenAI Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), and OpenAI has agreed to purchase approximately $250 billion worth of Microsoft Azure services.
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Amazon is providing funds essentially to exchange for more cloud business. This is to lock in that $38 billion cloud contract.
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NVIDIA is providing funds to ensure that OpenAI has money to buy its own GPUs. This is a means of &#34;locking in growth and preventing competition.&#34;
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This is a typical case of &#34;I lend you money so you can buy my stuff.&#34;
Secondly, giving cash to OpenAI is to reassure the creditors in the supply chain.
With the entry of giant funds, OpenAI gains certainty of being able to pay its bills, preventing supply chain financing from being further inflated by the debt market. For OpenAI, this is about seizing a time window: waiting for revenue and profits to &#34;grow enough to self-sustain,&#34; or at least reopening market financing channels.
Furthermore, tech giants externalize capital expenditure pressure as &#34;investments&#34; to avoid making their own financial statements look worse, thus stabilizing their stock prices.
Author Ken Brown emphasizes that a practical benefit of giants directly investing in OpenAI is that this money does not count as their own capital expenditure and does not need to be raised through new debt (at least for now). In the current market where AI capital expenditures are closely monitored, this difference in accounting and financing can significantly alleviate short-term valuation pressure.
<h2>A Game of Musical Chairs No One Can Afford to Lose</h2>
Why can't OpenAI be allowed to fail? Because the systemic risk is too great.
Currently, a large part of the stock prices of tech giants is &#34;AI premium.&#34; If OpenAI collapses due to lack of funds to pay for electricity and buy chips, the entire logic of the AI sector would collapse. Market founder Mark Montgomery describes this as a &#34;musical chairs game&#34;:
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&#34;Unless OpenAI Ultraman can find more funds to keep the balloon inflated, once it collapses, the market value of big tech companies could shrink by 50% to 80%.&#34;
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In simple terms, the giants do not think OpenAI is worth $730 billion, but rather that if they do not spend this $100 billion to buy peace of mind, their own shrinking market value will be ten times that number.
Marathon Venture Capital partner Panos Papadopoulos commented: &#34;If OpenAI reduces its commitment spending to hyperscale cloud providers, they would lose $1 trillion in market value, so what's $10 billion among friends?&#34;
<img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://wpimg-wscn.awtmt.com/d3ca0f7b-4de4-4099-8fcc-40c4c19cf8e1.png?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" alt="" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://wpimg-wscn.awtmt.com/d3ca0f7b-4de4-4099-8fcc-40c4c19cf8e1.png"/>
The same &#34;financing dance&#34; also appears in Musk's transactions
The article mentions that SpaceX will generate approximately $8 billion in EBITDA in 2025, while xAI burned about $9.5 billion in the first nine months of last year. The merger of the two companies will &#34;hide&#34; xAI's high consumption within a larger cash flow shell—this logic is highly analogous to &#34;the giants using cash to protect OpenAI's financing chain.&#34;

NVIDIA, Amazon, and others have successively participated in OpenAI's $100 billion financing. Analysts believe that OpenAI has become the lifeline for the valuations of tech giants; if continuous funding is not provided, it may trigger a collapse of AI logic, and tech giants could face a 50%-80% reduction in market value. "If OpenAI reduces its committed spending on hyperscale cloud providers, they would lose $1 trillion in market value, so what does $10 billion mean among friends?"

- The reported $100 billion financing for OpenAI reflects a self-rescue effort by tech giants to prevent an AI bubble from bursting.  
- Companies like Nvidia, Amazon, and Microsoft are investing significantly to secure their interests in AI-related services and maintain operational stability.  
- The overarching concern is that if OpenAI fails, the systemic risk could lead to massive losses for these tech companies, potentially reducing their market value by up to 80%.

Why are tech giants spending huge amounts on OpenAI?