NVIDIA to deploy 10 GW of systems at OpenAI, invest US$100 B

Source: NVIDIA blog post. From left: Altman, Brockman, and Huang speak to CNBC's Jon Fortt.

OpenAI and NVIDIA have announced a letter of intent (LoI) for a landmark partnership to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems for OpenAI’s next-generation AI infrastructure. The systems will train and run OpenAI's next generation of models on the path to deploying superintelligence.

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, NVIDIA said in a blog post. To support this deployment, including data centre and power capacity, NVIDIA intends to invest up to US$100 B in OpenAI progressively, as each gigawatt is deployed. The first phase is targeted to come online in 2H26 using the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform.

“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. 

“This investment and infrastructure partnership mark the next leap forward — deploying 10 gigawatts to power the next era of intelligence.”

“Everything starts with compute,” said Sam Altman, cofounder and CEO of OpenAI. 

“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.”

“We’ve been working closely with NVIDIA since the early days of OpenAI,” said 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.”

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-optimise 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 as partners, focused on building the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure.

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 (AGI) that benefits all of humanity. AGI refers to an AI model with human-like cognitive abilities.

NVIDIA and OpenAI look forward to finalising the details of this new phase of strategic partnership in the coming weeks. According to Huang, there are more gigawatt deliveries to come.

According to solar consultancy SunWiz, 10 gigawatts is enough to power two-thirds of South Australia’s electricity needs. South Australia has a population of about 1.9 million.  

The news follows an NVIDIA announcement of a collaboration with Intel, to jointly develop multiple generations of custom data centre and PC products that accelerate applications and workloads across hyperscale, enterprise and consumer markets.

The companies will focus on connecting NVIDIA and Intel architectures using NVIDIA NVLink — integrating the strengths of NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing with Intel’s CPU technologies and x86 ecosystem to deliver cutting-edge solutions.

For data centres, Intel will build NVIDIA-custom x86 CPUs that NVIDIA will integrate into its AI infrastructure platforms and offer to the market.

For personal computing, Intel will build and offer to the market x86 system-on-chips (SOCs) that integrate NVIDIA RTX GPU chiplets. These new x86 RTX SOCs will power a wide range of PCs that demand integration of world-class CPUs and GPUs.

NVIDIA will also invest US$5 B in Intel’s common stock. The investment is subject to customary closing conditions, including required regulatory approvals.

“AI is powering a new industrial revolution and reinventing every layer of the computing stack — from silicon to systems to software. At the heart of this reinvention is NVIDIA’s CUDA architecture,” said Huang. 

“This historic collaboration tightly couples NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing stack with Intel’s CPUs and the vast x86 ecosystem — a fusion of two world-class platforms. Together, we will expand our ecosystems and lay the foundation for the next era of computing.”

“Intel’s x86 architecture has been foundational to modern computing for decades — and we are innovating across our portfolio to enable the workloads of the future,” said Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel. 

“Intel’s leading data centre and client computing platforms, combined with our process technology, manufacturing and advanced packaging capabilities, will complement NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing leadership to enable new breakthroughs for the industry. We appreciate the confidence Jensen and the NVIDIA team have placed in us with their investment and look forward to the work ahead as we innovate for customers and grow our business.”