Investor Brad Gerstner has warned that OpenAI’s blockbuster chip partnerships with Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) remain, for now, little more than headline-grabbing announcements rather than tangible hardware deployments.

His comments add a note of skepticism to what has been hailed as one of the most consequential moves in the artificial intelligence industry this year.

“Now we will see what gets delivered,” said Gerstner, founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital, in an interview with CNBC on Monday. “Ultimately, the best chips will win.”

Gerstner’s remarks come on the heels of OpenAI’s sweeping deal with AMD that could see Sam Altman’s company take up to a 10% ownership stake in the chipmaker, while securing a multiyear supply of GPUs worth tens of billions of dollars. The deal marks one of the most significant GPU supply and equity partnerships ever seen in the AI sector — and a direct challenge to Nvidia’s dominance in the global AI hardware market.

The AMD alliance follows OpenAI’s deepening collaboration with Nvidia, whose graphics processors remain central to the training and deployment of advanced AI models. Together, these deals signal OpenAI’s growing ambitions to cement control over the computing power that fuels generative AI.

But for some investors, including Gerstner, the question is whether these announcements can translate into actual production.

“The deals provide more evidence that the world will remain compute-constrained despite best efforts to bring massive supply online,” he said, noting that the global scramble for GPUs is likely to persist well into the decade.

The surge in competition for AI hardware has made computing power a key frontier in both industry and geopolitics. Analysts say the OpenAI–AMD deal underscores the AI arms race now at the center of the U.S.-China technological rivalry. Washington has been encouraging an increase in domestic chip production to boost the U.S.’ AI innovation, while Beijing has intensified efforts to build its own semiconductor supply chain amid U.S. sanctions.

One of China’s leading AI firms, DeepSeek, has quickly emerged as a formidable rival. The company shocked the global AI community last year when it claimed to have developed a low-cost model capable of rivaling OpenAI’s GPT. DeepSeek has since continued its aggressive push, releasing open-source models powered by domestically produced chips — a move seen as a direct response to U.S. sanctions.

Meanwhile, OpenAI’s growing influence and for-profit expansion have reignited debate over the company’s original mission. Founded as a nonprofit research lab in 2015 with Elon Musk as one of its earliest cofounders and backers, OpenAI was initially created to ensure that artificial intelligence benefited humanity as a whole. But the company’s subsequent restructuring into a “capped-profit” model — and now its billion-dollar equity and hardware deals — have led many to question whether it still operates within that spirit.

Musk, who left OpenAI’s board in 2018 following a dispute over its direction, has become one of the company’s fiercest critics. He has repeatedly accused OpenAI of abandoning its open-source and nonprofit roots, claiming it has become too closely tied to commercial interests and corporate partners like Microsoft. Ironically, Musk has also praised recent efforts by the company to expand its AI infrastructure, calling its AMD deal a “smart move” that could redefine competition in the AI industry.

Altman has defended OpenAI’s hybrid structure, arguing that it allows the organization to raise the capital necessary for large-scale AI development while maintaining a mission-driven cap on profits. Still, as its valuation soars and its influence deepens, critics warn that the company risks drifting away from the public-interest ethos it was founded on.

Amid these tensions, OpenAI President Greg Brockman said the company’s partnerships are about scaling responsibly and ensuring access to compute for the entire ecosystem.

“What we’re really seeing is a world where there’s going to be absolute compute scarcity because there’s going to be so much demand for AI services, not just from OpenAI but from the entire ecosystem,” Brockman told CNBC’s Squawk on the Street Monday. “That’s why it’s so important for this whole industry to come together.”

OpenAI’s evolution has created diverse questions about its future. For investors like Gerstner, however, the key question remains whether these ambitious announcements can evolve into real-world deployments. And for critics like Musk, the broader question is whether OpenAI’s pursuit of profit and dominance can coexist with its founding promise to advance artificial intelligence for the public good.

The World Bank on Tuesday raised its 2025 growth forecast for China to 4.8%, up from its April estimate of 4%, signaling renewed optimism for the world’s second-largest economy despite an increasingly turbulent global trade environment fueled by U.S. tariffs.

According to CNBC, the revised outlook brings the projection closer to Beijing’s official target of around 5% GDP growth, marking a partial rebound for China’s economy following a year of mixed signals from the property market, consumer spending, and exports.

The Bank’s economists stopped short of citing a single reason for the upgraded forecast but noted that China has benefited from government stimulus and strong export activity, even as those supports are expected to fade in 2026.

Trade tensions between Beijing and Washington have remained a central risk factor. In April, the U.S. sharply increased tariffs on Chinese imports to over 100%, the highest since the height of the 2018–2019 trade war. The two countries later reached a temporary truce, now set to last until mid-November. Tariffs currently stand at an average of 57.6% — more than double their level at the start of the year — underscoring continued friction in trade relations under President Donald Trump’s protectionist economic agenda.

The Trump administration has repeatedly defended the tariffs as necessary to “rebalance global trade,” but they have also rattled markets and prompted companies across Asia to adjust supply chains. Some American firms, including Apple, had earlier expanded manufacturing operations in India to hedge against the risks of overreliance on China. However, as the tariffs drag on, uncertainty continues to cloud global investment sentiment, weighing on cross-border business flows throughout Asia.

In response, China intensified stimulus measures in late 2024, introducing consumer trade-in programs and supporting industrial production. These policies helped buoy retail and export activity through much of 2025. Exports to Southeast Asia and Europe climbed steadily, offsetting sharp declines in shipments to the United States. Analysts say that part of the export strength also came from companies rushing to fulfill orders ahead of tariff increases.

Still, the World Bank cautioned that the momentum may not last. It projects that China’s GDP growth will slow to 4.2% in 2026 as export gains ease and the government tapers its stimulus to rein in public debt. The country’s real estate sector remains a drag, with investment plunging 12.9% in the first eight months of the year.

Retail sales also showed sluggish recovery, rising just 3.4% year-on-year in August, missing analysts’ expectations. Early data from the eight-day “Golden Week” holiday suggest weak consumer spending. Nomura’s Chief China Economist, Ting Lu, noted that while passenger trips rose 5.4% year-on-year, the pace was much slower than during the May holiday season.

“Actual consumption growth could be even weaker than the data suggest,” Lu said, citing calendar effects and slowing household sentiment.

The World Bank’s report further highlighted China’s structural challenges, including youth unemployment — with one in seven young people jobless — an aging population, and slower productivity growth compared to other major economies. It also noted that Chinese startups generate fewer jobs relative to their U.S. counterparts, largely due to the dominance of state-owned enterprises.

According to the Bank’s estimates, a 1 percentage point decline in China’s GDP can reduce growth in the rest of developing East Asia and the Pacific by 0.3 percentage points. With China’s upgraded projection, the region’s overall growth outlook has been lifted to 4.8% in 2025, up from 4% previously forecast.

Globally, however, the World Bank remains cautious. In June, it lowered its 2025 world growth forecast to 2.3%, citing trade uncertainty and geopolitical tensions, warning that the slowdown would mark the weakest expansion since the 2008 financial crisis outside of global recessions.

China’s near-term prospects may have improved, but with Trump’s tariffs still in place and global trade increasingly fragmented, economists say Beijing faces the daunting task of sustaining growth while rebalancing its economy toward domestic consumption and innovation-driven sectors.