Nvidia and OpenAI’s $100B Deal to Power an AI Revolution
▼ Summary
– NVIDIA and OpenAI have formed a multi-year partnership to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems, representing the largest single AI infrastructure commitment in history.
– NVIDIA is investing a staggering $100 billion to support the construction of new OpenAI data centers, a sum that dwarfs all of its previous AI investments combined.
– OpenAI will use millions of NVIDIA GPUs, starting with deployments in late 2026, to fuel its next-generation AI research and support its rapidly growing user base of over 700 million weekly active users.
– The partnership is intended to provide the computational power needed to push the boundaries of AI model training and pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI).
– This exclusive, large-scale alliance between the leading AI hardware and an early software leader is a move that concerns other AI software companies.
Nvidia and OpenAI have forged a landmark partnership, committing to a staggering $100 billion investment to construct data centers powered by at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems. This unprecedented collaboration, formalized through a letter of intent, represents the single largest infrastructure project in the history of artificial intelligence. The initiative is designed to propel AI technology from research laboratories into widespread, real-world deployment, establishing a new global benchmark for computational scale.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s founder and CEO, described the venture as the most ambitious AI infrastructure undertaking ever conceived. He emphasized that the core objective is to build a foundational platform enabling artificial intelligence to achieve its full potential. OpenAI will leverage millions of Nvidia GPUs based on the forthcoming Vera Rubin platform to fuel its next-generation AI research. The initial phase of data center construction is scheduled to commence in the latter half of 2026, with the goal of pushing the boundaries of both large-scale model training and real-time inference capabilities.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, characterized the powerful new hardware as the essential fuel required to drive continuous improvement. He noted that this infrastructure is critical for developing more advanced models, increasing revenue, and accelerating progress across all of the company’s initiatives. While Nvidia has a history of investing in AI software firms, its commitment to OpenAI is of an entirely different magnitude. Previous investments, including participation in OpenAI’s 2024 funding round and backing for companies like Cohere and Mistral, totaled approximately $1 billion across 50 startups last year. The new deal dwarfs all of Nvidia’s prior AI investments combined.
OpenAI’s meteoric growth has positioned it far ahead of its competitors in both user adoption and financial scale. By mid-2025, the company’s annualized revenue had skyrocketed to an estimated $10 to $13 billion, a dramatic increase from $3.7 billion just a year prior. Its projected 2025 revenue of $12.7 billion easily surpasses the combined totals of its closest rivals. User growth has been equally explosive, with OpenAI recently announcing it surpassed 700 million weekly active users. This massive partnership with Nvidia is seen as the essential foundation needed to support this expanding user base and the incredibly resource-intensive workloads required to pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI).
As OpenAI’s preferred partner for compute and networking, Nvidia will work intimately with the company to co-optimize hardware, software, and model development. This deep integration aims to maximize efficiency and foster rapid innovation. The alliance occurs within a fiercely competitive global race to build immense AI data center capacity. Although OpenAI maintains collaborations with cloud providers like Microsoft and Oracle, the sheer scale of the Nvidia deployment sets a new industry standard. This tight-knit partnership between the undisputed leader in AI hardware and the pioneering force in AI software sends a clear signal to the market, likely causing significant concern among other AI software companies about their ability to compete on an even footing.
(Source: ZDNET)
