Nvidia will invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as the artificial intelligence lab sets out to build hundreds of billions of dollars in data centers based around the chipmaker’s AI processors, the companies said on Monday.
OpenAI plans to build and deploy Nvidia systems that require 10 gigawatts of power, the companies said on Monday. A gigawatt is a measure of power that is increasingly being used to describe the biggest clusters of AI chips.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC’s Jon Fortt in an interview in San Jose, California, that the 10 gigawatts is equal to between 4 million and 5 million graphics processing units (GPUs), which is what the company will ship in total this year and “twice as much as last year.”
“This is a giant project,” Huang said in the interview, alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, the company’s president.
Nvidia’s first investment of $10 billion will be deployed when the first gigawatt is completed, according to a person familiar with the matter. Investments will be made at then-current valuations, said the person, who declined to be named because the details are private.
Nvidia stock rose almost 4% during on Monday, instantly adding close to $170 billion in value to the company’s market cap, which now sits near $4.5 trillion.
The partnership, which Huang described as “monumental in size,” highlights the intimate link between OpenAI and Nvidia, two of the biggest drivers of the recent AI boom. Demand for Nvidia’s GPUs started picking up when OpenAI first released ChatGPT in 2022, and OpenAI still relies GPUs to develop its software and deploy it to users.
“Nvidia invests $100 billion in OpenAI, which then OpenAI turns back and gives it back to Nvidia,” Bryn Talkington, managing partner at Requisite Capital Management, told CNBC after the announcement. “I feel like this is going to be very virtuous for Jensen.”
It further signals the magnitude of Nvidia technology that OpenAI will need to develop next-generation AI that can do more than its current models. OpenAI was already in need of an increasing number of chips to serve its users. The company said it had 700 million active weekly users.
“You should expect a lot from us in the coming months,” Altman said in the interview. “There are three things that OpenAI has to do well: we have to do great AI research, we have to make these products people want to use, and we have to figure out how to do this unprecedented infrastructure challenge.”
The companies said the investment will be deployed “progressively” as the infrastructure is built and that Nvidia would be a “preferred” supplier for OpenAI for chips and networking gear. Nvidia dominates the market for AI chips, but faces increased competition from Advanced Micro Devices and cloud providers which are developing their own chips and systems to tie them together.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman walks on the day of a meeting of the White House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence (AI) Education in the East Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 4, 2025.
Brian Snyder | Reuters
In August, Huang told investors on an earnings call that building one gigawatt of data center capacity costs between $50 billion and $60 billion, of which about $35 billion of that is for Nvidia chips and systems.
Nvidia and OpenAI said that the first phase of the latest investment will come online in the second half of 2026, using Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin systems.
Nvidia’s investment comes after a roster of investors valued OpenAI at $500 billion in a recent secondary round. Microsoft was one of OpenAI’s early investors, and has a strategic partnership to integrate OpenAI models into its cloud service, Azure, and Microsoft Office. Other OpenAI investors include SoftBank and Thrive Capital.
The companies said on Monday that the partnership will compliment the infrastructure work it is doing with Microsoft, Oracle, SoftBank and the Stargate project.
Altman referred to Nvidia and Microsoft as “passive” investors and two of the company’s “most critical partners” in the CNBC interview.
Huang said Nvidia’s investment is “additive to everything that’s been announced and contracted.” He indicated to CNBC that it’s in addition to anything the company has told Wall Street about its financial expectations.
While this investment dwarfs Nvidia’s prior commitments, the chipmaker has been opening its wallet of late to put funds in many companies in and around the industry.
Last week, Nvidia said it’s taken a $5 billion stake in Intel and announced that the two companies will collaborate on AI processors. Nvidia also said it invested close to $700 million in U.K. data center startup Nscale. And CNBC reported on Thursday that the company spent over $900 million to hire Enfabrica CEO Rochan Sankar and other employees at the AI startup, and to license the company’s technology.
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