First The Government, Now OpenAI: About Nvidia’s $100 Billion Investment

Nvidia and OpenAI have announced a partnership to build data centres powered by Nvidia hardware. According to the companies’ joint press release on 22 September, the project involves deploying at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems, representing millions of GPUs.

The scale of this deal is hard to ignore with Nvidia committing to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, releasing funds as each gigawatt of infrastructure comes online. The first gigawatt is expected to be ready in the second half of 2026 using Nvidia’s new Vera Rubin platform.

OpenAI will treat Nvidia as its preferred partner for compute and networking, ensuring that the software developed for future AI models is matched closely to Nvidia’s hardware. Both companies described this as a long-term collaboration to support OpenAI’s next generation of models and its plans for artificial general intelligence.

 

How Much Money And Hardware Is Involved?

 

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang explained in an interview with CNBC that 10 gigawatts equates to between 4 and 5 million GPUs, the same number Nvidia expects to ship this year and double the figure from last year. He called the project “giant” and said it would demand resources rarely seen in computing.

Huang has previously said that building a gigawatt of data centre capacity can cost between $50 billion and $60 billion, with about $35 billion of that going directly to Nvidia systems. This means the full 10 gigawatt rollout could require hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure spending.

Investments will be staged… Impact Newswire reported that Nvidia’s first $10 billion tranche will arrive when the first gigawatt is operational. Further investments will be tied to the progress of later phases. Nvidia stock went up almost 4% after the announcement, adding about $170 billion to its market value, which now stands at around $4.5 trillion.

 

 

What Does OpenAI Gain From This?

 

For OpenAI, the partnership is an attempt to meet the very quickly growing demand. The company said it has more than 700 million weekly active users right now, and that usage is spread across global businesses, developers and consumers. CEO Sam Altman said the challenge lies in doing three things well: strong AI research, building products people want and managing the unprecedented scale of infrastructure required to run them.

Altman said: “Everything starts with compute. Compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future, and we will utilise what we’re building with NVIDIA to both create new AI breakthroughs and empower people and businesses with them at scale.”

OpenAI has already been valued at $500 billion in a recent secondary share sale backed by Microsoft, SoftBank, Thrive Capital and others. This deal gives it access to the hardware needed to train and run ever larger models, which Altman and president Greg Brockman said is key to keeping momentum.

Nvidia’s investment also secures its position as the preferred supplier of chips and networking equipment to OpenAI. Rivals such as AMD and cloud providers are working on alternatives, but both Altman and Huang made clear that Nvidia and Microsoft are seen as essential partners in OpenAI’s growth.

 

How Does This Relate To Nvidia’s Plans?

 

Nvidia has spent the past few years strengthening its hold on the AI market. Demand for its GPUs soared after ChatGPT was released in 2022, and OpenAI quickly became one of its most important customers. The $100 billion commitment extends this relationship, moving Nvidia from supplier to financial backer.

The company has also been active in other deals. They’re investing in the UK government, of course, with $700 million into UK data centre startup Nscaleand and last week it disclosed a $5 billion stake in Intel to work on AI processors and spent over $900 million recruiting Enfabrica’s CEO and team while licensing its technology. These were all pretty large deals and moves in themselves but pale in comparison to the OpenAI project.

Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said: “NVIDIA and OpenAI have pushed each other for a decade, from the first DGX supercomputer to the breakthrough of ChatGPT. This investment and infrastructure partnership mark the next leap forward — deploying 10 gigawatts to power the next era of intelligence.”

Greg Brockman, cofounder and president of OpenAI said: “We’ve been working closely with NVIDIA since the early days of OpenAI. We’ve utilised their platform to create AI systems that hundreds of millions of people use every day. We’re excited to deploy 10 gigawatts of compute with NVIDIA to push back the frontier of intelligence and scale the benefits of this technology to everyone.”