Nvidia Makes Massive Investment in OpenAI

Nvidia is making a $100 billion investment in OpenAI, teaming up with the company behind ChatGPT to build data centers on a scale that rivals the world's largest power plants. The deal, announced Monday, will see Nvidia provide OpenAI with at least 10 gigawatts of computing systems for new AI data centers. The Wall Street Journal offers some tangible perspective: That's roughly the same amount of electricity "produced by more than four Hoover Dams or the power consumed by eight million homes."

"This is a giant project," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang tells CNBC, describing OpenAI as the "fastest-growing software company in history." The idea is to pour resources into model training and deployment, betting that such massive computing power will pave the way for AI systems capable of reshaping industries and society at large. "The stuff that will come out of this superbrain will be remarkable in a way I think we don't really know how to think about yet," said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, also on CNBC.

The investment will roll out in phases, tied to each new gigawatt of capacity brought online, with the first phase expected by the second half of 2026 using Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform. Final details of the partnership are still being hashed out.