Nvidia plans to invest $100 billion in OpenAI, giving the ChatGPT maker a huge war chest to build data centers with the chip maker’s chips.
OpenAI will gain access to millions of Nvidia chips in the coming years.
“Everything starts with compute,” Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, said in a joint news release. “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.”
For OpenAI, the $100-billion investment will trickle in progressively as each gigawatt of the 10 planned gigawatts of power needed for the data centers is deployed. The first gigawatt data center is scheduled to go online in the second half of 2026.
“This investment and infrastructure partnership mark the next leap forward — deploying 10 gigawatts to power the next era of intelligence,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, said in a news release.
Globally, companies are expected to spend $375 billion on artificial intelligence infrastructure in 2025. Nvidia’s graphics processing units underlie most modern AI data centers. This makes its chips a critical commodity in the AI boom and has propelled it to the forefront of global geopolitics.
Nvidia has become a puppet master of the AI ecosystem. In the last year, the company has been at the center of several big-ticket deals, including a $250-million investment in CoreWeave, a cloud service provider that rents Nvidia GPUs. Soon after the investment, CoreWeave signed a $6.3-billion deal with the chip maker, ensuring any unsold cloud computing capacity will be purchased by Nvidia.
Last week, Nvidia picked up a $5-billion stake in its ailing rival Intel to develop data center and PC products. The same week, Nscale, another London-based cloud service provider that uses Nvidia chips, received a $500-million investment from Nvidia, which was followed by a $2.7-billion commitment to develop AI infrastructure in the U.K.
Critics are concerned that this could be an example of “circular financing,” in which a company invests in its biggest customers who then use the money to buy the investor’s products.
The concern is that this could lead to an overestimation of demand for Nvidia’s chips. Nvidia bulls see the $100-billion investment in OpenAI as another sign of the massive unmet demand for AI as companies and countries race to deploy computing infrastructure.
“We believe the Street is underestimating demand in this 4th Industrial Revolution,” said Dan Ives, senior equity analyst at Wedbush Securities. “We believe this is a multiplier impact as Nvidia is investing in Big Tech’s future and for every $1 Jensen puts into Nvidia, they will get $8 to $10 of revenue over the coming years.”
In 2016, Huang donated one of its first supercomputers, powered by eight GPUs, to OpenAI, which would go on to launch ChatGPT in 2022, marking the beginning of the generative AI boom.
OpenAI is currently valued at $500 billion, with 700 million weakly active users.
In January, alongside Japanese investor Softbank and database provider Oracle, OpenAI committed $100 billion to build AI infrastructure in the United States. As part of the “Stargate project,” the companies have started building out a 4.5-gigawatt data center in Texas. They plan to invest $500 billion over the next four years.
OpenAI signed a deal in May to build out a one-gigawatt data center complex in the United Arab Emirates, a deal that was brokered by the Trump administration. Oracle, Nvidia, Softbank, Cisco and G42, a royals-backed Emirati AI company, are set to back the project.
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