Investor pressure forces Nvidia to shrink its OpenAI bet just as Anthropic's numbers defy bubble warnings

Details

Nvidia has agreed to backstop OpenAI's planned 10-gigawatt Ohio data center at roughly half the original scale. Instead of guaranteeing $250 billion as initially reported, Nvidia will commit just under $120 billion for the first construction phase (~five gigawatts), after investors pushed back on concentration of risk. OpenAI is still negotiating a lease for the full project developed by SoftBank subsidiary SB Energy. Nvidia is also reportedly in separate talks on up to $350 billion in chip purchase financing for OpenAI. The retreat gives ammunition to AI bubble critics who see investor caution spreading even to the sector's biggest infrastructure winners. But the timing is awkward: Anthropic's numbers tell a sharply different story. The company's revenue more than doubled within a single quarter—jumping from $4.73 billion in Q1 to over $11.5 billion in Q2 2026, a 14x increase year-over-year, per Reuters. Anthropic reportedly projects $190–200 billion in revenue for 2028, dwarfing the $45 billion annual run rate the company disclosed as recently as May. Anthropic is planning a public offering at a near-$1 trillion valuation in late September or early October 2026. That said, financial analytics firm Ramp noted a slight flattening in Anthropic token demand among its business customers—a signal worth monitoring against the headline growth figures. Together, the two stories capture the current AI market in miniature: massive infrastructure commitments being repriced under investor pressure, while model providers post revenue growth that resists easy categorization as bubble or boom.