The recent pullback in Nvidia NVDA stock was short-lived, recouping a 4% dip in the last few weeks to re-hit a 52-week peak of $184 a share in Monday’s trading session after announcing it will invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI.
The surprise announcement comes as some analysts have framed OpenAI and Nvidia as being in a budding rivalry regarding the infrastructure layout for artificial intelligence.
To that point, OpenAI’s latest large language models (LLMs) were trained on Nvidia’s H100 GPUs and optimized on the chipmaker’s CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) platform, but the ChatGPT creator has recently tapped Broadcom AVGO to help co-design its own custom AI chips.
However, in a push to keep its AI chips and systems in use by the most innovative companies, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang stated the investment and infrastructure partnership with OpenAI marks the next leap forward.
Subsequently, many of Nvidia’s AI infrastructure partners also saw their stocks rip higher in Monday’s trading session, including CoreWeave CRWV, Dell Technologies DELL, and Oracle ORCL, among others.
As one of the largest, if not the largest, tech investments in history, Nvidia will allow OpenAI to accelerate the deployment of its next-gen models on the path to artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Lucrative for both companies, Jensen Huang stated that computing demand has been through the roof for AI, with ChatGPT being the most revolutionary AI project in history, utilized in every industry and country around the world. Regarding AGI, the goal of the partnership is to build an AI infrastructure that further excels AI in real-world applications.
The deal allows OpenAI to deploy and build at least 10 gigawatts (GW) of AI data centers that will be powered by Nvidia’s systems, translating into millions of its GPUs at work. Putting 10 gigawatts in perspective, New York City’s peak electricity demand hovers around 10-11 GW.
The first gigawatt of capacity is expected to go live in late 2026, using Nvidia’s upcoming Vera Rubin platform, a cutting-edge AI infrastructure system designed to power the next gen of massive-context AI applications.
Notably, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sees Nvidia's infrastructure investment as being crucial to building out better AI models that provide more complex services. Most importantly, the partnership will help alleviate compute restraints that OpenAI and the broader AI industry have been facing, driving revenue and meeting unsatisfied demand.
