Artificial intelligence is a team effort. For example: OpenAI needs microchips, and lots of them; Nvidia makes the best chips on the market. So it is intuitive and inevitable that the two tech companies would find common ground. Nonetheless, the enormous $100bn tie-up they announced on Monday looks a lot like financial theatre.

The crux of the deal is simple. Nvidia is going to supply chips to help OpenAI build enormous data centres, in which it will train and then host AI models such as the recently launched GPT-5. With it, though, comes a twist: Nvidia will also buy $100bn of OpenAI’s unlisted stock over time, adding to the small stake it already has. That’s comfortably more than the $72bn OpenAI has raised over its 10-year life, according to Crunchbase.

At first glance, this you-scratch-my-back, I-scratch-yours arrangement sounds a bit like the kind of vendor financing common during the early 2000s telecom frenzy. Companies such as Nortel, Lucent and Motorola bunged money to their customers in order to keep their revenue growing briskly, and were saddled with bad debt when the mania ended.