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Nvidia is working on a fresh round of AI deals worth more than $750 billion, accelerating investments that skeptics have warned are artificially inflating demand and valuations across the industry.

A partnership with South Korean conglomerate SK Group unveiled late Friday means the companies will be doing more than $500 billion in business with each other, Nvidia said. The world’s most valuable company is also in talks to backstop as much as $250 billion to help OpenAI lease computing power from a US data center project in what would be among the chipmaker’s biggest financing deals with a customer.

Big names from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to investor Michael Burry of “Big Short” fame have for months warned of the “circular” nature of such agreements, where Nvidia finances and takes stakes in companies and projects that use its chips. And yet, the pace of the deals is only quickening. The fear with these transactions is that they may skew demand, spur bad decision-making and magnify losses if AI fails to turn profits for those investing hundreds of billions of dollars in the technology.
Nvidia is also in discussions to finance $350 billion of OpenAI’s purchases of its chips for the US project, according to a person familiar with the matter. And on Monday, the company said it has made a “substantial” investment in Safe Superintelligence Inc., the AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. People familiar with the situation said Nvidia committed $5 billion.

On this episode, Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec speak with:

• Robert Schiffman, Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Technology Credit Analyst
• Kat Doherty, Bloomberg News Finance Reporter on Fanatics, BGC Ink Prediction Markets Deal With Sale of Exchange and Traders Are Getting a New Tool to Wager on the Biggest US Stocks
• Rahsaan Shears, AI Enterprise Transformation Leader at KPMG US on AI’s impact on early career, young workforce and how firms can harness skills
• Mark Gongloff, Bloomberg Opinion Columnist on climate latest: El Niño Risks Pushing World Past 2C Threshold