AI chipmaker Nvidia plans to invest $100B in OpenAI to support the ChatGPT creator’s development of new data centers.
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The GPU giant’s investment is aimed at boosting OpenAI’s efforts to develop data centers totaling at least 10 gigawatts of AI computing capacity, the firms announced Monday. The two companies have signed a letter of intent for the strategic partnership, which ensures that Nvidia’s processors provide the computing power within OpenAI’s expanding data center portfolio.
Nvidia will receive equity in OpenAI as part of the deal, Bloomberg reports. The chipmaker’s investment will be deployed progressively in $10B installments, with the first capital infusion coming once OpenAI’s first gigawatt of new capacity tied to the deal is brought online, according to CNBC.
The 10 GW of data center capacity targeted by the development effort is unique in its scale and ambition — roughly equivalent to the capacity needed to support every GPU Nvidia delivered this year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC.
By comparison, the total combined capacity of the entire North American data center market is currently 15.5 GW, according to JLL.
“Everything starts with compute,” said Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, in a statement announcing the deal. “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.”
The scale of Nvidia’s investment places the deal among the largest investments ever made to support another firm’s data center build-out, joining initiatives like OpenAI and Oracle’s Stargate Project, for which SoftBank has pledged an initial $100B.
Although this will be Nvidia’s first investment in OpenAI, the two firms have collaborated on infrastructure build-out in the past. Monday’s announcement comes just a week after the two firms reportedly both invested hundreds of millions of pounds in London-based developer Nscale to build UK data centers.
Nvidia, the world's most valuable company with a market capitalization of more than $4T, routinely makes large investments in firms that are among its largest customers or that it sees as critical to the growth of the broader AI ecosystem, often to support data center build-out.
GPU cloud firm CoreWeave received hundreds of millions of dollars from the chipmaker prior to going public in March. Nvidia also acquired a stake in U.S. AI data center firm Applied Digital last year.
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