In a bold departure from standard transaction strategy, OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman and a close-knit executive team have overseen infrastructure and chip supply agreements with a combined value of up to US$ 1.5 trillion recently, without involving the bank-and-law firm advisers that normally handle such deals. The deals, spanning multi-year commitments with companies such as Nvidia, AMD, Oracle and Broadcom, tie the startup’s fortunes directly to major players in the chip and infrastructure markets.
By bypassing the usual external advisers, OpenAI may have moved far more quickly —but it has also invited scrutiny over deal-terms, transparency and risk. Analysts have flagged that some of the agreements show “circular structures” that bind supplier, investor and customer roles in ways that deviate from typical arms-length transactions. For instance, one such contract entailed Nvidia investing up to US$ 100 billion in OpenAI while OpenAI commits to buying as much as 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems.
According to people close to the company, Altman relied heavily on a handful of internal executives, namely President Greg Brockman, CFO Sarah Friar and newly promoted infrastructure-financing lead Peter Hoeschele, to engineer the deals, while deliberately keeping traditional external banking and legal advisers in the background. By contrast, Altman did lean on former banker Michael Klein in fundraising contexts, though not specifically for the chip-supply deals.
These agreements have been built in the last 12 to 18 months as OpenAI races to secure vast computing infrastructure. The Nvidia deal, for instance, was announced in September 2025. Some of the earlier deals include cloud-computing deals with infrastructure partners and chip makers, initiated in 2024-25. In many cases the structure starts as a letter of intent, to deploy several gigawatts, for instance, and leaves detailed financial terms to be “worked out later”, according to sources close to the matter.
Although based in the U.S., these deals have global implications. For example, chip supply and data-centre build-out cross borders, power grids and supply chains from the U.S. to Asia and beyond. The circular deal mechanics —supplier becomes investor becomes customer— raise questions for regulators across jurisdictions about competition, disclosure and risk. Analysts warn that such entwined structures may complicate debt loads, scale-back options and future flexibility.
Altman pitched bold visions of large-scale compute deployment and innovation first, while leaving many of the financial and legal scaffolding to his team. The deals often embed milestone-linked payments, multi-year frameworks with optional scaling back if funding or demand changes, and in some cases warrants or equity stakes as part of the architecture, for example, in the AMD arrangement.