NVIDIA is deepening its business relationship with long-term partner OpenAI by announcing a US$100 billion investment from the former towards the latter, as well as gearing up for a gigawatt-scale infrastructure to accelerate the development of next-gen AI.
As Team Green continues to pour money into OpenAI, the new system will be training and running the next wave of models in hopes of achieving superintelligence, with the next generation NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform powering the cause, slated for 2H 2026.
Currently, most data centers and “AI Factory” around the world are at the megawatt scale with three-figure numbers as the norm, while recent announcements about building new data centers from other sources are signaling 1 gigawatt of power input, 10 gigawatt is a huge leap, as well as a big ambition, and will require crazy amount of money as well as bleeding edge hardware and manufacturing for building the necessary infrastructure like building, cooling, power distribution, and more.
Jensen Huang, NVIDIA’s CEO, pointed out that the two companies have been pushing each other since the days of the first DGX supercomputer and through the breakthrough of ChatGPT, calling this move “the next leap forward” in powering the next era of intelligence. Sam Altman echoed the sentiment, stressing that “everything starts with compute,” while Greg Brockman reminded everyone that NVIDIA’s platform has been a key part of OpenAI’s journey from the beginning.
The deal goes deeper than just hardware, as NVIDIA will be OpenAI’s preferred strategic compute and networking partner (of course), and the two will co-optimize their roadmaps so OpenAI’s models and infrastructure software are tuned to NVIDIA’s latest hardware and platforms. This complements existing collaborations both companies have with Microsoft, Oracle, SoftBank, and Stargate partners, all aimed at building the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure.
At the time of the joint press release, both parties only mentioned that they are finalizing details of the deal, and it could be done in the coming weeks.
