Nvidia, the chipmaking company, will invest up to $100bn in OpenAI and provide it with data center chips, the companies said on Monday, a tie-up between two of the highest-profile leaders in the global artificial intelligence race.
The deal, which will see Nvidia start delivering chips as soon as late 2026, will involve two separate but intertwined transactions, according to a person close to OpenAI. The startup will pay Nvidia in cash for chips, and Nvidia will invest in OpenAI for non-controlling shares, the person said.
The first $10bn of Nvidia’s investment in OpenAI, which was most recently valued at $500bn, will begin when the two companies reach a definitive agreement for OpenAI to purchase Nvidia chips. Nvidia previously funded OpenAI with a $6.6bn investment. The ChatGPT maker has pledged 49% of its profits to Microsoft after a $13bn investment made in 2023. OpenAI is in the midst of a long and much-litigated process to convert to a for-profit entity.
The companies unveiled a letter of intent for a landmark strategic partnership to deploy at least 10GW of Nvidia chips for OpenAI’s AI infrastructure.
“Everything starts with compute,” Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said in a 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 with them at scale.”
Altman has said in the past that his company is constrained by how much computing power it can access, most often measured in the number of graphics processing units, or GPUs, that allow artificial intelligence products to answer users’ queries.
They aim to finalize partnership details in the coming weeks, with the first deployment phase targeted to come online in the second half of 2026.
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Nvidia’s investment comes just days after it committed $5bn to struggling chipmaker Intel. Nvidia, the most valuable company in the world at a $4tn market capitalization, is seen as a leader in artificial intelligence by dint of its cutting-edge chips.
