Nvidia is set to invest $100 billion (about R1.85 trillion) in OpenAI, as part of a strategic partnership to build one of the largest artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure deployments in history.
“This is the biggest AI infrastructure project in history. This partnership is about building an AI infrastructure that enables AI to go from the labs into the world,” says Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang.
Under the deal, OpenAI will deploy at least 10-gigawatts of Nvidia systems, including “millions of GPUs” for its next-generation AI infrastructure, with the first gigawatt coming online in the second half of 2026 via Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, comments: “There’s no partner but Nvidia that can do this at this kind of scale, at this kind of speed.”
The million-GPU AI factories built through this agreement will help OpenAI meet the training and inference demands of its ‘next frontier’ of AI models.
“Building this infrastructure is critical to everything we want to do. This is the fuel that we need to drive improvement, drive better models, drive revenue, drive everything,” Altman notes.
According to a blogpost on Nvidia’s website, since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which in 2022 became the fastest application in history to reach 100 million users, the company has grown its user base to more than 700 million weekly active users. It has also delivered increasingly advanced capabilities, including support for agentic AI, AI reasoning, multimodal data and longer context windows.
To support its next phase of growth, the company’s AI infrastructure must scale up to meet not only training but inference demands of the most advanced models for agentic and reasoning AI users worldwide.
“The cost per unit of intelligence will keep falling and falling and falling, and we think that’s great. But on the other side, the frontier of AI, maximum intellectual capability, is going up and up. And that enables more and more use − and a lot of it,” says Altman.
OpenAI’s key investors include Microsoft, SoftBank Group and Nvidia, alongside venture capital firms Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund and Coatue.
Nvidia is currently the most valuable company in the world, according to Marketcap, standing at approximately $4.47 trillion (about R82.6 trillion). This puts it ahead of both Microsoft and Apple, which are valued in the region of $3.8 trillion to $4 trillion (R70 trillion to R74 trillion).
Nvidia also invested $5 billion (about R92 billion) in its long-time rival Intel, purchasing common stock at around $23.28 per share. The deal is part of a broader collaboration in which Intel will build custom CPUs to integrate with Nvidia’s systems, for both data centres and personal computing devices.
This lifeline comes as Intel continues to struggle to keep pace with AI-driven chip design and performance.
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