TMTPOST -- Nvidia Corporation on Monday jumped over 3.9% to settle at $183.61, hitting its close record after the artificial intelligence (AI) chip titan unveiled a milestone partnership with OpenAI.
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Nvidia and OpenAI announced they agreed a letter of intent on a strategic partnership to deploy at least 10 gigawatts (GW) of Nvidia systems for OpenAI’s next-generation AI infrastructure to train and run its next generation of models on the path to deploying superintelligence, a hypothetical AI system that exceeds the powers of the human brain. A GW, equal to one bilion watts, is a measure of power that is increasingly being used to describe the biggest clusters of AI chips.
To support the planned deployment including data center and power capacity, Nvidia made its largest-ever spend commitment. It intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as the new Nvidia systems are deployed. The first phase is targeted to come online in the second half of 2026 using the Nvidia Vera Rubin platform. Vera Rubin is a combination of Rubin GPU, the successor to Nvidia’s latest advanced Blackwell graphic processing unit, and Vera CPU, Nvidia’s first custom central processor unit.
“Nvidia and OpenAI have pushed each other for a decade, from the first DGX supercomputer to the breakthrough of ChatGPT,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in a joint statement. “This investment and infrastructure partnership mark the next leap forward — deploying 10 gigawatts to power the next era of intelligence.”
Huang touted OpenAI’s deployment as “a giant project ” in an interview with CNBC on Monday. The 10GW is equal to between 4 million and 5 million GPUs,which is what Nvidia will ship in total this year and “twice as much as last year,” Huang said. He also said the $100 billion investment is "additive to everything that’s been announced and contracted" , hinting its beyond anything Nvidia has told Wall Street about its financial forecast.
OpenAI will work with Nvidia as a preferred strategic compute and networking partner for its AI factory growth plans. The two companies will work together to co-optimize their roadmaps for OpenAI’s model and infrastructure software and Nvidia’s hardware and software, according to the joint statement.
This partnership complements the deep work OpenAI and Nvidia are already doing with a broad network of collaborators, including Microsoft, Oracle, SoftBank and other partners of Stargate, focused on building the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure. Stargate is a joint venture created by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle which plan to pour $500 billion over the next four years into 10GW AI infrastrucure in the U.S.
The statement didn’t disclose how Nvidia’s committed funds would be allocated or timetable of OpenAI’s total datacenter project. The pairs said they will finalize the details of the new strategic partnership in the coming weeks.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in the interview alongside Huang called Nvidia and Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest investor, as “passive” investors and two of the company’s “most critical partners”.
Altman said only Nvidia had the capability to enable an AI infrastructure buildout at this type of enormous scale and speed. Without the infrastructure being outlined in the deal, OpenAI wouldn't be able to provide its services, according to the chief executive.
"We can't keep making better models," Altman said. "And now that we really see what's on the near-term horizon of how good the models are getting, the new use cases that are being enabled, what people want to do, this is like the fuel that we need to drive improvement, to drive better models, to drive revenue, everything."
“I feel like this is going to be very virtuous for Jensen,” Bryn Talkington, managing partner at Requisite Capital Management told CNBC after the announcement, noting that OpenAI will turn back and give the investment back to Nvidia.
The timing of the latest deal suggests Nvidia is "diversifying both geographically (supply chain) and strategically (across the AI value chain). This looks more like infrastructure building than bubble behavior," David Bader, the director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology commented.
"This partnership represents the maturation of AI infrastructure as a legitimate asset class," Bader said. "We're witnessing the formation of vertical integration in the AI stack - from chips to training to deployment. Nvidia isn't just selling hardware anymore; they're becoming equity partners in the AI economy they're enabling."
