Nvidia is set to invest up to $100bn in OpenAI and supply the ChatGPT-maker with advanced data centre chips, in one of the most significant partnerships yet in the global race to dominate artificial intelligence.
The deal, announced Monday, will be structured as two interlinked transactions. OpenAI will pay Nvidia in cash for chips, while Nvidia will take non-controlling shares in the AI start-up, according to a person close to the company. Shipments of the chipmaker’s hardware are due to begin as early as late 2026.
The first tranche of the investment, worth $10bn, will be triggered when OpenAI signs a definitive agreement to purchase Nvidia chips. Nvidia, already the world’s most valuable company with a $4tn market capitalisation, had previously injected $6.6bn into OpenAI. The San Francisco-based start-up remains tied to Microsoft, which secured 49% of its profits after a $13bn investment in 2023.
Both companies signed a letter of intent to deploy at least 10GW of Nvidia’s chips to power OpenAI’s infrastructure, underscoring the vast scale of their ambitions.
“Everything starts with compute,” said OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman. “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 long argued that the pace of OpenAI’s innovation is constrained by limited access to computing power, particularly GPUs, which underpin the ability of AI products to respond to user queries in real time.
The companies said they expect to finalise the partnership details in the coming weeks, with the first deployment phase planned for the second half of 2026.
Nvidia’s move comes just days after it pledged $5bn to struggling chipmaker Intel, part of a wider strategy to extend its dominance in AI hardware while backing some of the world’s most high-profile players in the sector.