NVIDIA to invest up to $100B in OpenAI for “biggest AI infrastructure project in history”

OpenAI and NVIDIA have announced a major partnership to accelerate OpenAI’s computational capabilities. The industry leaders are calling it the “largest AI infrastructure project in history.”

The initiative was revealed during a joint conversation with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and OpenAI President Greg Brockman, hosted by CNBC’s Jon Fortt.

“This is the biggest AI infrastructure project in history,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “This partnership is about building an AI infrastructure that enables AI to go from the labs into the world.”

OpenAI x NVIDIA

This partnership will involve building large data centres with powerful NVIDIA GPUs to help OpenAI scale its computing power.

As part of the partnership, OpenAI will deploy at least 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems built on the new NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform.

To support this rollout, NVIDIA intends to invest up to $100B in OpenAI, with funding tied to each gigawatt deployed.

The project is expected to start in the second half of 2026 using the new NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform.

“There’s no partner but NVIDIA that can do this at this kind of scale, at this kind of speed,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. “This is the fuel we need to drive improvement, build better models, and expand access to AI for everyone.”

OpenAI will collaborate with NVIDIA as its strategic partner for computing and networking to support its AI factory growth plans.

Together, they will co-optimise their roadmaps, aligning OpenAI’s model and infrastructure software with NVIDIA’s hardware and software.

This partnership builds on the existing teamwork between OpenAI and NVIDIA, along with other partners like Microsoft, Oracle, SoftBank, and Stargate, all aiming to create top-notch AI infrastructure.

OpenAI has grown to over 700M weekly active users and strong adoption across global enterprises, small businesses and developers.

This partnership will help OpenAI advance its mission to build artificial general intelligence that benefits all of humanity.

“We’ve been working closely with NVIDIA since the early days of OpenAI,” says Greg Brockman, cofounder and president of OpenAI. “We’ve utilised 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.”

NVIDIA and OpenAI look forward to finalising the details of this new phase of strategic partnership in the coming weeks.