16 July 2025, China, Peking: Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, speaks to journalists. During a trip to China, Huang gave a speech at the opening of the supply chain trade fair and met Chinese politicians. Photo: Johannes Neudecker/dpa (Photo by Johannes Neudecker/picture alliance via Getty Images)
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Nvidia will invest $100 billion in OpenAI as the artificial intelligence lab sets out to build hundreds of billions of dollars in data centers based around Nvidia’s AI chips, 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 stock rose 3% during trading on Monday.
The partnership highlights how linked OpenAI and Nvidia are as two of the biggest drivers of the recent artificial intelligence boom. Demand for Nvidia’s GPUs first started rising when OpenAI first released ChatGPT in 2022, and OpenAI still relies on Nvidia’s AI chips, called GPUs, to develop its software and deploy it to users.
It also signals just how many Nvidia chips OpenAI will need in order to develop next-generation artificial intelligence that can do more than its current models. It also suggests that OpenAI will need increasing amounts of chips to serve its users, and said it had 700 million active weekly users on Monday.
“This is monumental in size,” CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC’s Jon Fortt in an interview in San Jose on Monday alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman.
“You should expect a lot from us in the coming months,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said. “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.”
‘A giant project’
Huang said that the 10 gigawatts is equal to between 4 million and 5 million GPUS, which is what the company will ship in total this year and “twice as much as last year.””This is a giant project,” he said.
In August, Nvidia CEO Jensen 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 those costs are for Nvidia chips and systems.
The companies said that the first phase of the investment will come online in the second half of 2026, using Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin systems.
Nvidia will join a roster of investors that valued OpenAI at $500 billion in a recent secondary round. Microsoft was one of OpenAI’s early investors, and has strategic partnership with it to integrate OpenAI models into its cloud service, Azure, and Microsoft Office. Other OpenAI investors include SoftBank and Thrive Capital.
The companies said that the partnership will compliment the infrastructure work it is doing with Microsoft, Oracle, SoftBank, and its 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 Fortt 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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