Inside OpenAI and Nvidia’s US$100bn AI Infrastructure Deal
As AI infrastructure deals bloom across the world with increasing AI demand, OpenAI and Nvidia announce a partnership to deploy 10 gigawatts of GPU-powered data centres.
The agreement includes Nvidia’s commitment to invest up to US$100bn in OpenAI as infrastructure capacity comes online.
The partnership targets deployment of systems dedicated to AI model training and inference operations.
Gigawatts measure electrical power capacity, with 10GW representing sufficient energy to power approximately 7.5 million homes simultaneously.
Inside Nvidia and OpenAI’s collaboration
The first phase deployment is scheduled for the second half of 2026 using Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform.
Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of Nvidia, says: “Nvidia and OpenAI have pushed each other for a decade, from the first DGX supercomputer to the breakthrough of ChatGPT.
“This investment and infrastructure partnership mark the next leap forward – deploying 10GW to power the next era of intelligence.”
The DGX system is Nvidia’s integrated hardware and software platform designed for AI workloads, combining multiple GPUs with high-speed interconnects and optimised software stacks.
“This is the biggest AI infrastructure project in history,” Jensen tells CNBC.
“This partnership is about building an AI infrastructure that enables AI to go from the labs into the world.”
OpenAI’s critical compute infrastructure requirements
Sam Altman, Cofounder and CEO of OpenAI, positions compute capacity as fundamental to AI development.
Compute refers to computational processing power required for training large language models and running AI inference operations.
“There’s no partner but Nvidia that can do this at this kind of scale, at this kind of speed,” Sam tells CNBC.
“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.”
Since OpenAI operates large language models (LLMs) that require substantial computational resources, the company’s ChatGPT service processes queries from hundreds of millions of users, necessitating significant infrastructure capacity.
“Everything starts with compute,” Sam explains.
“Compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future, and we will utilise what we’re building with Nvidia to both create new AI breakthroughs and empower people and businesses with them at scale.”
Greg Brockman, Cofounder and President of OpenAI, emphasises the operational relationship between the companies: “We’ve been working closely with Nvidia since the early days of OpenAI,” he says.
“We’ve utilised their platform to create AI systems that hundreds of millions of people use every day. We’re excited to deploy 10GW of compute with Nvidia to push back the frontier of intelligence and scale the benefits of this technology to everyone.”
How Nvidia’s investment structure enables expansion
The partnership establishes Nvidia as OpenAI’s preferred strategic compute and networking partner for AI factory expansion.
AI factories are large-scale data centres designed for AI workloads, incorporating specialised cooling, power distribution, and networking infrastructure.
The investment structure provides progressive funding as each gigawatt of capacity becomes operational.
This approach spreads financial commitment across deployment phases whilst enabling capacity scaling based on demonstrated demand.
The Vera Rubin platform is Nvidia’s next-generation data centre architecture for large-scale AI operations.
OpenAI currently reports over 700 million weekly active users across its services, including ChatGPT and API access for developers.
The partnership builds on existing collaborations both companies maintain with Microsoft, Oracle, SoftBank and Stargate partners to create integrated AI infrastructure capabilities.
Jensen says: “We’re literally going to connect intelligence to every application, to every use case, to every device – and we’re just at the beginning
“This is the first 10GW, I assure you of that.”
