With their latest deals to fund the data center boom, AI firms are making history — in terms of dollar size, convention-busting structure, and astronomical risk. The U.S. is betting its economic fortunes on the belief that OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and other AI leaders are wizardly innovators dreaming up novel financing vehicles to drive a golden future — rather than salesmen juggling billions and praying the music never stops. The trillion-dollar question neither Silicon Valley nor Wall Street can answer is whether the AI building spree will end up looking more like Google’s epochal long-term value creation or Enron’s catastrophically faulty financial engineering. Nvidia announced Monday it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI in stages, with OpenAI using the money to “build and deploy at least 10 gigawatts of AI data centers with Nvidia systems.” OpenAI also announced Tuesday additional commitments for its Stargate alliance with Oracle and SoftBank to build five new U.S. data centers. This brings the sum it has lined up for the effort $400 billion of the way toward a $500 billion goal.

Full report : Why OpenAI and Nvidia’s AI spending spree could be a risky bet.