No two companies are as important to the recent AI boom as OpenAI and Nvidia. OpenAI’s journey from research lab to chatbot juggernaut reoriented the entire tech industry around the thesis that large language models will change everything. Nvidia’s chips have been almost synonymous with scaling , on which OpenAI and others are collectively spending hundreds of billions of dollars. For the last few years, the companies’ fortunes have been aligned, and their relationship has been, for the most part, an obvious one: OpenAI, which has become one of the biggest startups in the world, is a major customer for Nvidia, which has become the largest public company in the world.

In 2025, their twin trajectories have left much of the rest of the economy behind, and their stated ambitions — necessary

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