Chipmaker Nvidia will invest up to $100 billion in ChatGPT owner OpenAI and provide it with data center chips, the companies said Monday, a tie-up between two of the highest profile leaders in the global artificial intelligence race.
The move underscores the increasingly overlapping interests of the various tech giants developing advanced AI systems. The deal gives Nvidia a financial stake in the most prominent AI company in the world, which is already an important customer.
The investment gives OpenAI the cash and access it needs to buy advanced chips it needs in the first place to maintain its dominance in an increasingly competitive landscape.
The deal will involve two separate but intertwined transactions, according to a person close to OpenAI. The startup will pay Nvidia in cash for chips, while Nvidia will invest in OpenAI for non-controlling shares, the person said.
The first $10 billion of Nvidia’s investment will begin once the two sides reach a definitive agreement for OpenAI to purchase Nvidia systems. OpenAI was most recently valued at $500 billion.
Nvidia will start delivering hardware as soon as late 2026, with the first gigawatt of computing power to be deployed in the second half of that year on its Vera Rubin platform.
“Everything starts with compute,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement.
“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.”
The two companies signed a letter of intent to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems for OpenAI’s AI infrastructure and said they aim to finalize partnership details in the coming weeks.
Nvidia shares were up as much as 4.4% while shares of Oracle, which partners with OpenAI, SoftBank, and Microsoft on the $500 billion Stargate AI data center project, gained nearly 5%.
Nvidia’s investment comes days after it committed $5 billion to struggling chipmaker Intel.
OpenAI and its backer Microsoft also announced earlier this month that they have signed a non-binding deal for new relationship terms that would allow for OpenAI’s restructuring into a for-profit company.
Nvidia also backed OpenAI in a $6.6 billion funding round in October 2024. The world’s most valuable firm making another sizable investment in OpenAI could lead to antitrust scrutiny.
The Trump administration has taken a much lighter touch on competition issues compared to President Biden’s antitrust enforcers.
In June 2024 the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission reached a deal that cleared the way for potential antitrust investigations into the dominant roles that Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia play in the artificial intelligence industry.
