Jan. 22 at 12:05 AM
PickAlpha Midday-
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is reportedly courting Middle East capital for a gigantic new funding round (talks described as
$50B+ at roughly
$750B–
$830B valuation). The pitch is simple: AI is now an infrastructure race (chips, data centers, talent), and sovereign pools are among the few with the balance sheet to keep feeding it.
Tickers:
$NVDA,
$MSFT,
$AMZN
Our view is this is less “startup fundraising” and more “macro capital formation”—petrodollars + sovereign balance sheets are becoming a structural marginal buyer of AI buildout. That supports the AI capex cycle even if public markets get squeamish, and it raises the bar for smaller players who can’t finance compute at scale. If this round progresses, the cleanest read-through remains infrastructure toll-takers (accelerators + cloud build capacity):
$NVDA on sustained cluster demand, and
$MSFT/
$AMZN as the monetization layer that can turn raw compute into recurring enterprise spend.
