NVIDIA and OpenAI announced a strategic partnership on Monday that will see the chip manufacturer invest up to $100 billion in the artificial intelligence company as part of a massive infrastructure expansion plan. The collaboration aims to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA computing systems to power OpenAI's next-generation AI models and advance toward what the companies call "superintelligence."
The partnership represents one of the largest AI infrastructure investments announced to date, with the first phase targeted to come online in the second half of 2026 using NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform. The 10-gigawatt deployment will encompass millions of GPUs across AI data centers.
"NVIDIA and OpenAI have pushed each other for a decade, from the first DGX supercomputer to the breakthrough of ChatGPT," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "This investment and infrastructure partnership mark the next leap forward – deploying 10 gigawatts to power the next era of intelligence."
The announcement comes as competition intensifies in the artificial intelligence sector, with companies racing to secure the massive computing resources needed to train increasingly sophisticated AI models. OpenAI has grown to over 700 million weekly active users.
Sam Altman, cofounder and CEO of OpenAI, emphasized the fundamental importance of computational power in AI development. "Everything starts with compute," Altman said. "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 partnership builds on a decade-long collaboration between the two companies, dating back to OpenAI's early development phases. Greg Brockman, cofounder and president of OpenAI, highlighted this historical relationship in announcing the expanded partnership.
"We've been working closely with NVIDIA since the early days of OpenAI," Brockman said. "We've utilized their platform to create AI systems that hundreds of millions of people use every day. We're excited to deploy 10 gigawatts of compute with NVIDIA to push back the frontier of intelligence and scale the benefits of this technology to everyone."
Under the agreement, OpenAI will work with NVIDIA as a preferred strategic compute and networking partner for its AI infrastructure expansion plans. The companies will co-optimize their development roadmaps, aligning OpenAI's model and infrastructure software with NVIDIA's hardware and software platforms.
The partnership operates alongside OpenAI's existing collaborations with technology giants including Microsoft, Oracle, SoftBank and Stargate partners, all focused on building advanced AI infrastructure. This multi-partner approach reflects the enormous scale and complexity of modern AI development, which requires coordination across hardware manufacturers, cloud providers, and software developers.
NVIDIA's investment structure will be progressive, with funds deployed as each gigawatt of computing capacity comes online. This phased approach allows both companies to scale the infrastructure incrementally while managing the massive capital requirements involved in such a large-scale deployment.
The 10-gigawatt target represents a substantial increase in AI computing capacity. For context, large data centers typically operate in the range of hundreds of megawatts, making this deployment roughly equivalent to dozens of major facilities dedicated specifically to AI workloads.
Both companies indicated they expect to finalize the detailed terms of this strategic partnership in the coming weeks. The agreement supports OpenAI's stated mission to develop artificial general intelligence that benefits humanity while providing NVIDIA with a major customer for its advanced GPU systems. Immediately following the news, NVIDIA's stock shot up by about 4 percentage points.
