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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- This deal seals an NVIDIA and OpenAI partnership for years.
- This deal is bigger than all of NVIDIA’s other AI deals combined.
- All other AI software companies must be concerned.
Nvidia’s partnership with OpenAI to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems in the next few years is a jaw-dropper. Backing this massive investment in OpenAI‘s data centers is a staggering $100 billion from Nvidia as the new facilities come online.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
The collaboration, formalized through a letter of intent, marks the most significant single infrastructure commitment we’ve ever seen in the rapidly growing AI industry.
“This is the biggest AI infrastructure project in history,” said Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang in a blog post. “This partnership is about building an AI infrastructure that enables AI to go from the labs into the world.”
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OpenAI, the pioneering force behind ChatGPT, will use millions of Nvidia GPUs to fuel its next generation of AI research and deployment. The first phase of datacenter rollouts is slated to begin in the second half of 2026, built atop NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin platform, and is expected to push the boundaries of both AI model training and real-time inference at unprecedented scales.
Leaders from both companies have emphasized the transformative potential of their alliance.
“This investment and infrastructure partnership mark the next leap forward — deploying 10 gigawatts to power the next era of intelligence,” added Huang. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman echoed the sentiment, calling the forthcoming hardware platform “the fuel that we need to drive improvement, drive better models, drive revenue, drive everything.”
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While Nvidia has made significant investments in AI software companies before, there’s been nothing on the scale of its $100-billion commitment to OpenAI. Previously, NVIDIA participated in funding rounds for prominent AI software startups, including earlier investments in OpenAI’s 2024 $6.6-billion round, and backing companies such as Cohere, Mistral, Perplexity, CoreWeave, and Scale AI. In total, Nvidia invested around $1 billion across 50 AI startups in 2024.
OpenAI’s growth has far outpaced virtually every other company in the AI space, both in terms of user adoption and financial scale. By mid-2025, OpenAI’s annualized revenue had soared to $10–$13 billion — up from $3.7 billion in 2024 — and its projected 2025 revenue of $12.7 billion easily surpasses that of all its major competitors.
OpenAI’s user growth has also outpaced its rivals. The company said it recently surpassed 700 million weekly active users. This deal with NVIDIA is seen as key to supporting both a surging user base and the resource-intensive workloads required to pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI). As OpenAI’s preferred compute and networking partner, NVIDIA will work closely with OpenAI to optimize hardware, software, and model development roadmaps for maximal efficiency and innovation.
Also: Report: OpenAI will launch its own AI chip next year
The partnership arrives against the backdrop of fierce global competition to build massive AI datacenter capacity. While OpenAI continues to collaborate with cloud giants like Microsoft, Oracle, and SoftBank, the scale of the NVIDIA deployment sets a new benchmark in the industry.
With leadership on both sides touting this as only the beginning of a global AI buildout, the OpenAI-NVIDIA alliance is poised to leave a profound mark on AI’s future. It’s also a move that must concern other AI software companies, since the no-question-about-it leading AI hardware company is now working hand-in-glove with the early AI software leader.
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