NVIDIA is investing up to $100 billion in OpenAI to build 10 gigawatts of AI data centers

NVIDIA will invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as the ChatGPT maker sets out to build at least 10 gigawatts of AI data centers using NVIDIA chips and systems. The strategic partnership is gargantuan in scale. The 10-gigawatt buildout will require millions of NVIDIA GPUs to run OpenAI’s next-generation models. NVIDIA’s investment will be doled out progressively as each gigawatt comes online.

The first phase of this plan is expected to come online in the second half of 2026, and will be built on NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin platform, which NVIDIA CEO will be a “big, big, huge step up,” over the current-gen Blackwell chips.

“NVIDIA and OpenAI have pushed each other for a decade, from the first DGX supercomputer to the breakthrough of ChatGPT,” said Jensen Huang in a announcing the letter of the intent for the partnership. “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,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

NVIDIA has made a number of strategic investments lately, including in Intel, shortly after the took a 10 percent stake in the American chipmaker. The company also recently to license AI technology from startup Enfabrica and hire its CEO and other key employees.

OpenAI has also formed other strategic partnerships over the last few years, including a somewhat complicated . This summer it struck a to build out 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity using more than 2 million Oracle chips. That deal was part of , the strategic partnership between SoftBank, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Oracle, Arm and Microsoft with a promise to spend $500 billion in the US on AI infrastructure.