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Feb 02, 2026
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Welcome back! Nvidia CEO confirms "a great deal of money" to be invested in OpenAI. Oracle plans to raise up to $50 billion to fund cloud expansion. SpaceX seeks approval to launch 1 million satellites.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Saturday that the AI chip designer “will invest a great deal of money” in OpenAI, “probably the largest investment we have ever made.” The comments, which he made to a gaggle of reporters in Taiwan, appear to confirm The Information’s Wednesday report that Nvidia was in talks to invest up to $30 billion in OpenAI as part of the ChatGPT maker’s
effort to raise $100 billion at a pre-investment valuation of $750 billion. Amazon and Microsoft also are discussing putting in considerable sums of capital, the report said. Nvidia’s biggest ever investment happened in December, when it agreed to pay around $20 billion to hire a team from AI chip designer Groq and license the startup’s technology. The OpenAI investment indirectly benefits Nvidia, as OpenAI’s biggest cost is renting Nvidia servers from cloud providers such as Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle. Huang said OpenAI was “one of the most consequential companies of our time” and downplayed the idea he had tensions with the ChatGPT maker. The comments came a day after The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia’s tentative deal to invest as much as $100 billion in OpenAI to help it build 10
gigawatts of its own data center capacity over a period of years has stalled. When the $100 billion deal was announced in September, OpenAI and Nvidia executives said the agreement had not been finalized and they hoped to work out the details in the coming weeks. The Information reported at the time that the deal could involve OpenAI leasing chips directly from Nvidia. But since then, Nvidia disclosed to shareholders that the deal with OpenAI might not come to fruition.
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Oracle said Sunday it plans to raise between $45 billion and $50 billion this year through a mix of debt and equity to fund the rapid expansion of its cloud computing business. Oracle said the funds will go toward data center development to serve several large customers including OpenAI, Advanced Micro Devices, xAI, Meta Platforms, TikTok and Nvidia. Oracle previously hinted it would need to raise additional debt to fund its growth but hadn’t disclosed a specific plan for the year. Notably, Oracle said the new funding wouldn’t just go toward data center capacity for OpenAI, which has committed to spend several hundred billion dollars on Oracle Cloud in the coming years. Oracle shares are down 50% from last year’s high—erasing around $450 billion in market value—as investors question how much upfront
investment Oracle will need to make before it will begin seeing meaningful revenue growth from the OpenAI contract. There are also concerns around whether OpenAI can pay for the cloud rentals and whether Oracle can get the data centers ready on time. Lenders have also grown cautious of all of the borrowing tied to Oracle data centers and have said privately that they want to limit their exposure. Developers building Oracle’s data centers for OpenAI have already borrowed more $65 billion in construction debt. Roughly half of the new funding will come from equity and the other half will come from a bond offering, Oracle said. In the three months ended at the end of November, Oracle burned roughly $10 billion, driven by spending on data centers, and in September raised an $18 billion bond offering. Oracle ended the quarter with about $20 billion in cash, even as its spending pushed its free cash flow negative and prompted the company to lean more heavily on debt.
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SpaceX has asked for permission to launch as many as 1 million satellites into space to function as a massive orbital data center, according to a company filing with the Federal Communications Commission. The filing outlines a plan for a satellite system that would be far larger than has ever been publicly detailed by SpaceX or any other company. Only about 25,000 satellites have ever been launched into orbit in history, according to the European Space Agency. “By directly harnessing near-constant solar power with little operating or maintenance cost, these satellites will achieve transformative cost and energy
efficiency while significantly reducing the environmental impact associated with terrestrial data centers,” SpaceX said in the filing from late Friday. The SpaceX filing did not include details such as the size of the satellites, their cost, or when they would be launched. Space firms sometimes ask for permission to launch more satellites than they actually wind up releasing. Musk has said that space-based data centers will be more economical than those on Earth due to more abundant solar energy and cheaper cooling.
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Shares of videogame software creator Unity fell 24% Friday after Google unveiled Project Genie, a tool customers can use to create virtual worlds. Shares of other videogame-related firms Take Two and Roblox dropped 8% and 13%, respectively. The selloff likely wiped out tens of billions of dollars in equity value across various stocks. The reaction to Google’s new product is yet another example of the acute sensitivity of equity investors to potential AI threats to traditional software—even if the threats are half-baked. For instance, Google called the product an “experimental
research prototype” and said “generated worlds might not look completely true-to-life or always adhere closely to prompts or images, or real-world physics.” It added that “characters can sometimes be less controllable, or experience higher latency in control.” Investors likely are considering the possibility that Google could quickly improve the product to the point where it can materially draw interest from videogame creators. For now, Google is including Project Genie in a large bundle of AI services for $249 a month.
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An entity linked to a member of the United Arab Emirates royal family secretly purchased 49% of President Trump’s family’s crypto company, World Liberty Financial, the Wall Street Journal reported. Aryam Investment 1, a firm backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, made a $500 million investment in World Liberty. The first part of the investment was made just days before President Trump took office for his second term, according to the WSJ. Trump family entities received $187 million from the first installment of the investment, according to the WSJ. Part of the
investment was directed to entities linked to Steve Witkoff, the President’s Middle East envoy, and an entity tied to World Liberty co-founders Zak Folkman and Chase Herro, the | | | |
