OpenAI cannot close roughly $18 billion in financing tied to its Broadcom (AVGO) custom-chip partnership, The Information reported Thursday. The shortfall is the latest sign that AI infrastructure deals are outrunning the capital available to fund them.
The reported gap covers an early tranche of a multi-year accelerator rollout worth 10 gigawatts of OpenAI-designed chips. The custom silicon program is the centerpiece of the company’s plan to reduce its dependence on Nvidia (NVDA).
OpenAI’s Spending Math Gets Tighter
The original Broadcom agreement, unveiled in October 2025, sketched a hardware buildout pegged at roughly $500 billion. That figure spans chips, networking, power, and data center capacity. The 10-gigawatt rollout was meant to ease OpenAI’s reliance on Nvidia hardware.
OpenAI is projected to burn through about $115 billion cumulatively by 2029, even as revenue scales fast. Recent reporting around missed internal growth targets has already drawn fresh investor scrutiny.
Partners have stepped in with their own financing to keep deals moving. Oracle (ORCL) raised $18 billion in bonds last September to back its roughly $300 billion OpenAI commitment.
AI Capex Faces a New Stress Test
Hyperscaler 2026 capital spending is now estimated at $600 to $720 billion. Roughly three-quarters of that total is earmarked for AI infrastructure. Lenders are increasingly cautious that returns will not arrive on schedule.
Nvidia itself has flagged a sharp rise in unpaid customer balances. Receivables now sit near $33 billion as buyers take longer to settle invoices. Investor Michael Burry has called the resulting revenue accounting suspicious.
“The fake Disney-OpenAI deal is reflective of the AI bubble as a whole, where we’re repeatedly told about the existence of multi-billion dollar deals as though they were solid and definitive, like OpenAI’s Broadcom, AMD and $100bn NVIDIA deals,” one user commented.
OpenAI’s options are narrow. The company can restructure the tranche, replace lenders, or trim the chip rollout. Each path will shape how much projected 2026 AI capex actually lands.
Worldcoin (WLD) price dropped only modestly, falling to $0.2526 on this news.