NVIDIA will invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as the ChatGPT maker sets out to build at least 10 gigawatts of AI data centers using NVIDIA chips and systems. The strategic partnership announced today is gargantuan in scale. The 10-gigawatt buildout will require millions of NVIDIA GPUs to run OpenAI's next-generation models. NVIDIA's investment will be doled out progressively as each gigawatt comes online.
The first phase of this plan is expected to come online in the second half of 2026, and will be built on NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform, which NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang promised will be a "big, big, huge step up," over the current-gen Blackwell chips.
“NVIDIA and OpenAI have pushed each other for a decade, from the first DGX supercomputer to the breakthrough of ChatGPT,” said Jensen Huang in a press release announcing the letter of the intent for the partnership. “Compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future, and we will utilize what we’re building with NVIDIA to both create new AI breakthroughs and empower people and businesses with them at scale," said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.
NVIDIA has made a number of strategic investments lately, including making a $5 billion investment in Intel, shortly after the United States government took a 10 percent stake in the American chipmaker. The company also recently spent more than $900 million to license AI technology from startup Enfabrica and hire its CEO and other key employees.