Chipmaker Nvidia will invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI and provide data centre chips as part of a tie-up between the two firms, Reuters reports. The agreement, announced on Monday, involves two separate but intertwined transactions. Nvidia will deliver chips as soon as late 2026, and the startup will pay Nvidia in cash for the chips while Nvidia will take non-controlling shares in OpenAI. The article states the first $10 billion of Nvidia’s investment will begin once the parties reach a definitive agreement for OpenAI to purchase Nvidia chips. Nvidia did not immediately respond to requests for clarification about the deal.
The companies signed a letter of intent for a strategic partnership to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia chips for OpenAI’s Artificial Intelligence infrastructure, with partners aiming to finalise details in the coming weeks. The first deployment phase is targeted to come online in the second half of 2026. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said Everything starts with compute and added, 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 Artificial Intelligence breakthroughs and empower people and businesses with them at scale. The article places the pact alongside other recent moves, including a separate collaboration announced last week between Nvidia and Intel on AI chips.
The report notes Nvidia’s investment follows a recent commitment of $5 billion to Intel and mentions a prior Nvidia backing of OpenAI in a $6.6b funding round in October 2024. It also flags potential antitrust scrutiny, citing the United States justice department and the federal trade commission reaching a deal in June 2024 that cleared the way for possible investigations into the dominant roles of Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia in the Artificial Intelligence industry. Nvidia’s stock rose by more than 3.9 percent as of 2pm in New York (18:00 GMT) on the day of the announcement.
