Nvidia to invest $100 billion in OpenAI to build 10GW AI infrastructure for superintelligence

Nvidia is placing its biggest bet yet on artificial intelligence. The chipmaker announced plans to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, backing Sam Altman’s push to build massive data centers capable of running the company’s next generation of AI models.

The partnership is built around a staggering figure: 10 gigawatts of computing power. That translates to four to five million GPUs — roughly double the number Nvidia shipped last year. The first phase, powered by Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform, is expected to go live in the second half of 2026.

In a joint announcement on Monday, the two companies said the “strategic partnership enables OpenAI to build and deploy at least 10 gigawatts of AI data centers with NVIDIA systems representing millions of GPUs for OpenAI’s next-generation AI infrastructure.”

“NVIDIA and OpenAI have pushed each other for a decade, from the first DGX supercomputer to the breakthrough of ChatGPT,” said Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s founder and CEO. “This investment and infrastructure partnership mark the next leap forward — deploying 10 gigawatts to power the next era of intelligence.”

Huang appeared alongside Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman in San Jose, calling the project “giant” and “monumental in size.” The scale reflects the sheer demand for Nvidia’s hardware as OpenAI races to keep up with user growth and train models it hopes will edge closer to superintelligence. OpenAI says it now has 700 million weekly active users.

The investment will be staged as new capacity comes online, starting with an initial $10 billion once the first gigawatt is built. Nvidia will remain the “preferred” supplier for chips and networking gear, deepening a relationship that began long before ChatGPT. Investors cheered the announcement, sending Nvidia stock up nearly 4% on Monday — adding $170 billion to its market cap, which now hovers near $4.5 trillion.

For Altman, the deal is about more than GPUs. He described the challenge ahead as threefold: “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.”

Building one gigawatt of data center capacity is estimated to cost between $50 and $60 billion, with about $35 billion of that tied to Nvidia systems. That makes the $100 billion commitment both a necessity and a show of dominance. As Bryn Talkington of Requisite Capital Management told CNBC: “Nvidia invests $100 billion in OpenAI, which then OpenAI turns back and gives it back to Nvidia. I feel like this is going to be very virtuous for Jensen.”

The deal adds to Nvidia’s recent spending spree. The company took a $5 billion stake in Intel, put $700 million into U.K. data center startup Nscale, and spent nearly $1 billion hiring Enfabrica’s CEO and team while licensing its technology. Huang said the OpenAI investment is “additive to everything that’s been announced and contracted.”

Microsoft remains a strategic partner and investor in OpenAI, alongside SoftBank, Thrive Capital, and others. Altman described both Microsoft and Nvidia as “passive” investors but emphasized that they remain two of the company’s “most critical partners.”

If anything, the announcement highlights the dependency between OpenAI and Nvidia — one building the models, the other selling the chips to make them possible. Together, they’re betting tens of billions that the demand for intelligence at scale will only grow.

Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, and Greg Brockman