Nvidia and OpenAI have inked a letter of intent for a massive deal worth up to $100 billion that locks in OpenAI as a customer of Nvidia’s most advanced chips over an unspecified period of time.

“Everything starts with compute,” said Sam Altman, cofounder and CEO of OpenAI, in a press release. “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.”

Companies agree on 10 gigawatts of AI capacity rolled out ‘progressively’

The deal will unlock at least 10 gigawatts of AI capacity in data centers, the two companies said on Monday. The money will be spent “progressively as each gigawatt is deployed,” according to the press release.

Ten gigawatts is equivalent to between 4 million and 5 million GPUs, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC on Monday. The first gigawatt of the partnership will coincide with the upcoming Nvidia Vera Rubin platform. AI capacity enabled by the new chips is expected to begin coming online in the second half of 2026.

While OpenAI has used Nvidia’s advanced chips for a decade, the new deal places Nvidia as a formal “preferred strategic compute and networking partner” to the AI darling. Both companies are part of the web of recent AI buildout alliances between Microsoft, Oracle, SoftBank, and other members of the Stargate project.

Nvidia’s already sky-high stock rose 4% on Monday.

“NVIDIA and OpenAI have pushed each other for a decade, from the first DGX supercomputer to the breakthrough of ChatGPT,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, in the press release. “This investment and infrastructure partnership mark the next leap forward — deploying 10 gigawatts to power the next era of intelligence.”

The two companies plan to reach a final agreement “in the coming weeks,” according to an OpenAI blog post.

Nvidia funded Intel, UK businesses

Nvidia has announced a flurry of deals across the tech industry and the political sphere recently.

Last week, Nvidia promised a $5 billion investment in its competitor, Intel. Huang’s firm was also among several US tech giants to promise a collective $42 billion to technology investments in the UK, a country whose government has been friendly to the US push for data center construction.

Generative AI from OpenAI and DeepMind outperformed human students at the 2025 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC).