Photo credit: NVIDIA Corporation

In a move that signals the next giant leap for artificial intelligence, two of the industry's titans, NVIDIA and OpenAI, have announced a monumental strategic partnership. The collaboration, laid out in a letter of intent, will see NVIDIA invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI to help deploy a staggering 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA's next-generation AI systems.

Think of it as a superhighway for AI: a massive infrastructure project designed to power the next era of intelligent systems. The goal is to build the "AI factory" of the future, enabling OpenAI to train and run its upcoming models on a scale that will push the boundaries of what's currently possible with AI.

The partnership isn't just a handshake; it's a deep, integrated commitment. The funding from NVIDIA will be deployed as OpenAI builds out the infrastructure, ensuring a steady flow of capital to match the immense scale of the project. The first phase, slated to come online in the second half of 2026, will utilize NVIDIA's cutting-edge Vera Rubin platform, a system specifically engineered for "massive-context inference" that can process huge amounts of data.

This isn't a new relationship. As NVIDIA's founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, put it, the two companies have been pushing each other for a decade, from the early days of their DGX supercomputers to the breakthrough of ChatGPT. This new partnership, he says, is the next logical step—a leap forward to power the next era of intelligence.

OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, echoed this sentiment, emphasizing that “everything starts with compute.” He sees this infrastructure as the foundation for the economy of the future, enabling the company to not only create new AI breakthroughs but also to empower people and businesses with these tools at a massive scale.

With OpenAI now serving over 700 million weekly active users, the demand for this kind of advanced computing power is skyrocketing. The collaboration with NVIDIA will solidify OpenAI's position and help it continue its mission to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can benefit all of humanity.

While the partnership complements existing relationships with other major players like Microsoft and Oracle, it cements NVIDIA as a preferred strategic compute and networking partner. Both companies will work together to align their technological roadmaps, ensuring that OpenAI's models and software are perfectly optimized for NVIDIA's hardware.

The final details are still being worked out, but the message is clear: The race to build the most advanced AI is accelerating, and NVIDIA and OpenAI are pooling their resources to lead the charge.