According to The Wall Street Journal, Sam Altman turned a quiet White House appearance into a global power play that dragged Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Oracle, AMD, Broadcom, and SoftBank straight into OpenAI’s gravity field.
It all started in January, when SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son stood beside Sam and President Donald Trump to announce what is billed as the biggest AI infrastructure project in history.
And thousands of miles away, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang was wrapping up Lunar New Year celebrations in Asia, furious that the man whose company had fueled OpenAI’s rise was now watching someone else share the stage with its CEO.
Now for nearly a decade, Jensen supplied OpenAI with the chips that made ChatGPT possible. But this time, he wanted to be more than a supplier. Silicon Valley’s golden boy wanted a seat at the table. It was time.
And so within weeks, Nvidia privately proposed its own plan to Sam: cut SoftBank out, raise capital together, and build the largest computing network ever attempted. The result was a $100 billion agreement, finalized at Nvidia’s Santa Clara headquarters.
“This is the largest computing project in history,” Jensen reportedly said at the announcement. But oh, Sam’s public appearance had since triggered full-blown FOMO among Silicon Valley’s elite.
Sam fuels the trillion-dollar AI race
Right after managing to kick Elon Musk out of OpenAI, Sam began brokering deals faster than anyone could track, pitting tech giants against one another as they scrambled for relevance in the AI ecosystem.
That scramble linked America’s biggest chipmakers and cloud providers directly to a company that still isn’t profitable. Yet Wall Street didn’t care. Over four separate trading days in two months, shares of Oracle, Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom surged by a combined $630 billion, each spike fueled by new OpenAI partnerships that lifted the entire U.S. stock market to record highs.
In a 2019 blog post titled “How To Be Successful,” Sam wrote, “The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion.” That belief is now underwriting his empire.
Since ChatGPT’s viral launch, he’s promised that AI will cure cancer, teach every student on earth, and mint infinite profits. Internally, he told employees that OpenAI plans to reach 250 gigawatts of compute by 2033, a buildout worth $10 trillion, enough to power Germany.
OpenAI expects $13 billion in revenue this year but has already committed to $650 billion in computing bills across its deals with Nvidia and Oracle alone. When factoring AMD, Broadcom, and Microsoft, the total is nearly $1 trillion.
Critics say the commitments look like a bubble. Sam dismisses that. He says shortages in computing power are delaying product rollouts, but insists revenue will scale with access. OpenAI’s new video app, Sora, topping the App Store this month, is his proof. At a February event in Tokyo with Son, Sam allegedly said, “You just have to trust the exponential.”
How Sam turned rivals into partners
The 40‑year‑old CEO has always chased risk. He dropped out of Stanford, used poker winnings to pay tuition, and poured millions into crypto and nuclear fusion. His biggest gamble, Project Stargate, began in 2024 when he asked Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to invest $100 billion into new data centers for OpenAI. Nadella refused. So did TSMC’s C.C. Wei, calling him “too aggressive for me to believe.”
That’s when Son stepped in.
Over breakfast at Son’s Versailles‑style estate near Tokyo, Sam pitched a joint venture that would see SoftBank finance a nationwide network of data centers for OpenAI.Son agreed, announcing the $500 billion Stargate project alongside Sam and Trump in Washington.
SoftBank’s shares jumped 11%, as did those of other tech firms tied to the venture. But the alliance later hit turbulence as the two sides argued over site locations. Only two sites have been announced so far, which is pretty tiny compared to OpenAI’s broader capacity deals.
At Davos that same month, Nadella joked on TV about the Stargate hype: “Look, all I know is, I’m good for my $80 billion.” Days later, a TD Cowen report revealed Microsoft had canceled several U.S. data‑center leases related to OpenAI. The company then allowed Sam to source computing power from elsewhere.
Oracle swooped in next with a $300 billion contract, sending its stock up 40% and briefly making Larry Ellison the world’s richest man. A week later, Nadella retaliated, unveiling what he called “the world’s most powerful AI data center” in Wisconsin, partly for OpenAI training.
By mid‑year, another rumor set off alarms via The Information, which reported that OpenAI had begun renting Google’s TPU chips. Jensen apparently called Sam directly. Nvidia soon signed a $350 billion leasing deal for 5 million GPUs and secured the right to invest another $100 billion to help finance it.
Nvidia also agreed to guarantee some of OpenAI’s data‑center loans, a risk that could leave the company on the hook for billions if OpenAI defaults.
The momentum carried to AMD, whose CEO, Lisa Su, invited Sam to her “Advancing AI” event in San Jose. “Can I call you an AI icon?” she asked. AMD offered OpenAI a massive deal: 6 gigawatts of compute in exchange for up to 10% of AMD’s future stock. Its shares surged by 24% after the announcement.
Jensen mocked the decision on TV but quickly matched it. Soon after, Broadcom confirmed a new joint chip project with OpenAI, adding another 10 gigawatts of computing capacity to the tally.
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