Nvidia, the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, said on Monday that it would invest $100 billion in OpenAI, a deal that will allow the start-up behind ChatGPT to use the chipmaker’s artificial intelligence semiconductors inside its data centers.
The investment is the latest example of OpenAI raising money from the companies it relies on for products and services. Microsoft, which invested $10 billion in OpenAI in 2023, has made billions of dollars after the start-up paid it for computing power from its Azure data centers.
Nvidia invested in the start-up last year as well. During an appearance on CNBC on Monday, Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, said his company would support the largest data center build out in history, which will result in the sale of four to five million Nvidia chips to OpenAI.
The investment is separate from OpenAI’s latest funding round, which has been led by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank. That fund-raising effort could pump $40 billion into the A.I. start-up and value the company at $300 billion. Other investors include Microsoft, Thrive Capital, Coatue and Altimeter.
OpenAI is now in talks to sell $6 billion in employee-owned shares owned by current and former employees. This sale would value the company at around $500 billion.
In January, OpenAI and its partners at SoftBank and the cloud computing giant Oracle joined President Trump in announcing that they would spend up to $500 billion on new data center infrastructure in the United States. As part of the plan, called Project Stargate, the companies have already erected a data center in Abilene, Texas, and intend to build additional facilities in other parts of the country.
Separately, OpenAI plans to build a computing complex in the United Arab Emirates, following an agreement between the Trump administration and the Persian Gulf nation. This data center is part of a venture with Oracle, SoftBank, the Emirati artificial intelligence firm G42 and others.
(The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
As Nvidia has grown from being a little-known maker of chips designed for computer games to being at the forefront of the A.I. boom, it has made a series of investments in companies that rely on its products. The chipmaker invested several hundred million dollars in CoreWeave, an A.I. cloud computing service provider, and owns more than 5 percent of the company. CoreWeave has spent heavily on Nvidia’s products, including ordering $6.3 billion in A.I. chips this month.
Nvidia has also invested in Lambda, an A.I. cloud start-up. Like CoreWeave, the company buys chips from Nvidia.
The investments have raised questions about whether Nvidia is overstating the health of its business by investing in companies that then buy its products, said Ben Bajarin, the chief executive of Creative Strategies, a tech research firm. But that hasn’t changed the fundamentals of Nvidia’s business, which has steadily increased sales of its A.I. chips.
Mr. Bajarin said the investment arrangement was predicated on the fact that OpenAI needed more computing power from Nvidia to support its A.I. software development and deployment. He added, “So Nvidia has the demand for the chips, but are also investing, hoping that OpenAI itself becomes a good investment.”
Tripp Mickle reports on some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Nvidia, Google and Apple. He also writes about trends across the tech industry like layoffs and artificial intelligence.
Cade Metz is a Times reporter who writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology.
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