Nvidia cuts its OpenAI guarantee to $120B while Anthropic’s revenue defies the bubble talk

Nvidia was supposed to stand behind $250 billion. It’s now prepared to guarantee just under $120 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal, after investors pushed back over how much risk the company was taking on.

That’s not a rounding error. That’s a company looking at its own exposure to the biggest customer in AI and deciding half is enough.

What the smaller number actually covers

The guarantee applies to the first construction phase, which would deliver about five gigawatts of capacity. OpenAI is negotiating separately for a lease on the full 10-gigawatt project, developed by SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary.

And there’s a second track running alongside it. Nvidia is in talks over separate financing for OpenAI’s chip purchases worth up to $350 billion.

So the relationship isn’t shrinking. The written commitment is.

Why bubble skeptics will grab this

Nvidia has been the single clearest beneficiary of the AI buildout. When that company halves its risk under pressure from its own shareholders, it reads as caution from the party with the best view of the demand curve.

Critics who’ve spent the past year warning about an AI bubble now have a concrete data point instead of a vibe. Halving a guarantee is the kind of move you make when you’re modeling what happens if the capacity gets built and the revenue doesn’t show up.

Anthropic’s quarter says the opposite

Anthropic’s revenue more than doubled in a single quarter, going from $4.73 billion in Q1 to over $11.5 billion in Q2, a 14x increase year over year, according to Reuters.

Those two stories don’t fit together neatly, and that’s the interesting part. One of the biggest suppliers is pulling back on paper while one of the biggest buyers of compute is posting numbers that look nothing like a slowdown.

People familiar with the company’s finances say Anthropic projects revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion for 2028. Set that against the annual run rate of about $45 billion the company shared in May and you get a sense of how steep the internal curve is assumed to be.

Anthropic says it grew revenue by more than 10x in each of the three years leading up to early 2026.

The number to watch isn’t the projection

Forward projections for 2028 are the easiest thing in the world to publish and the hardest to hold anyone to. The quarter-over-quarter jump from $4.73 billion to over $11.5 billion is the part that already happened.

If those numbers hold up, they’d signal that demand for proprietary AI services keeps climbing, even with political headwinds and growing competition from China.

There’s one crack worth noting. Financial services firm Ramp recently measured a slight flattening in demand for Anthropic tokens among its business customers. Slight, and among one firm’s customers. But it’s the sort of early reading that either turns into nothing or turns into the story in six months.

An IPO priced against all of it

Anthropic reportedly plans to go public at a valuation near $1 trillion in late September or early October.

That listing is where these two threads get resolved in public. Nvidia trimmed a guarantee because investors made it. Anthropic will ask a much larger pool of investors to underwrite a trillion-dollar number on the strength of a quarter that more than doubled.

Watch which way that pricing lands. It’ll tell you more about the market’s actual conviction than any guarantee figure negotiated behind closed doors.