Nvidia plans to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as part of data center buildout

Nvidia will invest $100 billion in OpenAI as the artificial intelligence lab sets out to build hundreds of billions of dollars in data centers based around Nvidia's AI chips, the companies said on Monday.

OpenAI plans to build and deploy Nvidia systems that require 10 gigawatts of power, the companies said on Monday. A gigawatt is a measure of power that is increasingly being used to describe the biggest clusters of AI chips.

The partnership highlights how linked OpenAI and Nvidia are as two of the biggest drivers of the recent artificial intelligence boom. Demand for Nvidia's GPUs first started rising when OpenAI first released ChatGPT in 2022, and OpenAI still relies on Nvidia's AI chips to develop its software and deploy it to users.

It also signals just how many Nvidia chips OpenAI will need in order to develop next-generation artificial intelligence that can do more than its current models. It also suggests that OpenAI will need increasing amounts of chips to serve its users, and said it had 700 million active weekly users on Monday.

"This is monumental in size," CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC's Jon Fortt in an interview on Monday alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman.

"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," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement.

In August, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told investors on an earnings call that building one gigawatt of data center capacity costs between $50 billion and $60 billion, of which about $35 billion of those costs are for Nvidia chips and systems.

Nvidia will join a roster of investors that valued OpenAI at $500 billion in a recent secondary round. Microsoft was one of OpenAI's early investors, and has strategic partnership with it to integrate OpenAI models into its cloud service, Azure, and Microsoft Office. Other OpenAI investors include SoftBank and Thrive Capital.

The companies said that the partnership will compliment the infrastructure work it is doing with Microsoft, Oracle, SoftBank, and its Stargate project.

Altman referred to Nvidia and Microsoft as "passive" investors and two of the company's "most critical partners" in the CNBC interview.

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