OpenAI and Nvidia announced a letter of intent for a landmark strategic partnership to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia AI infrastructure systems. Nvidia plans to invest $100 billion in OpenAI as part of this.
The companies will work on OpenAI’s next-generation AI infrastructure to train and run its next generation of models on the path to deploying superintelligence. This deal comes days after Nvidia and Intel teamed up on AI CPUs and GPUs — including an agreement to invest $5 billion in Intel’s stock.
To support this deployment including data center and power capacity, Nvidia said it intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as the new Nvidia systems are deployed. In contrast to the Intel deal, where Nvidia is buying stock on the public market, Nvidia is investing $100 billion in cash in privately-held OpenAI.
The first phase is targeted to come online in the second half of 2026 using the Nvidia Vera Rubin platform. This means OpenAI will deploy multi-gigawatt data centers powered by millions of Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs), the hardware behind AI.
“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, in a statement. “This investment and infrastructure partnership mark the next leap forward — deploying 10 gigawatts to power the next era of intelligence.”
To put this in perspective, GamesBeat asked Ian Cutress, chief analyst at More than Moore, what it means. Cutress cited links that showed in 2025, Nvidia is expected to ship hardware that needs nine gigawatts of power (compute + overhead). And in May 2025, in one month, in China, 90 gigawatts of solar was turned on and plugged into the grid.
As a rule of thumb, I’ve been told that 10 gigawatts of systems is equivalent to $500 billion to $600 billion in total AI infrastructure spend. Ben Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies, noted the dollar value could be greater than $200 billion.
“With everything, access to the grid is an issue and will remain a constant challenge. [That’s why] people are focusing on the neocloud partners who have power contracts already locked up,” Bajarin said in a message to GamesBeat.
I still think this signals the long term runway of demand for compute and while this is still a huge build out of infrastructure and we still have many years to go.
“Everything starts with compute,” said Sam Altman, cofounder and CEO of OpenAI, in a statement. “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.”
“We’ve been working closely with Nvidia since the early days of OpenAI,” said Greg Brockman, cofounder and president of OpenAI, in a statement. “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.”
OpenAI will work with Nvidia as a preferred strategic compute and networking partner for its AI factory growth plans. OpenAI and Nvidia will work together to co-optimize their roadmaps for OpenAI’s model and infrastructure software and Nvidia’s hardware and software.
This partnership complements the deep work OpenAI and Nvidia are already doing with a broad network of collaborators, including Microsoft, Oracle, SoftBank and Stargate partners, focused on building the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure.
“This is huge!,” said Jim McGregor, an analyst at Tirias Research, in a message to GamesBeat. “OpenAI already accounts for the lion’s share of token generation because of its brand and acceptance.”
He added, “Having guaranteed access and an investment from Nvidia ensures that Nvidia will power ChatGPT going forward, and the investment will also facilitate the buildout of capacity for OpenAI. It’s just another notch in Nvidia’s armour to fend off competitors. It will also put OpenAI’s aspirations of doing its own chips on the back burner.”
OpenAI has grown to over 700 million 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.
Nvidia and OpenAI look forward to finalizing the details of this new phase of strategic partnership in the coming weeks.
“Like Nvidia investments into Coreweave, Lambda, and Nebius, these create demand for more Nvidia GPUs,” said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategies. “Nvidia and OpenAI likely agreed to a minimum number of purchases that do not exclude AMD, Broadcom, or Marvell-backed TPUs. The power is substantial and would have to be planned a few years in advance, as this is incremental, as Nvidia says.”