On September 22, 2025 NVIDIA and OpenAI announced a letter of intent for a strategic partnership to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems for OpenAI’s next-generation AI infrastructure. NVIDIA’s release stated that “NVIDIA intends to invest up to 100 billion dollars in OpenAI as the new NVIDIA systems are deployed,” with the investment flowing progressively as each gigawatt comes online. The first gigawatt was slated for the second half of 2026 on NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin platform.
The scale is enormous: 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems is equivalent to between 4 and 5 million GPUs. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang called it “the next leap forward,” and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said “compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future.” OpenAI President Greg Brockman noted the two companies had worked together “since the early days of OpenAI.”
A crucial detail, often lost in coverage, is that the announcement was a letter of intent, not a closed deal. The figure was framed as NVIDIA intending to invest “up to” 100 billion dollars, conditioned on milestones - each tranche tied to a gigawatt of capacity actually being deployed. That structure made the headline number a ceiling on a phased, conditional plan rather than money committed up front.
Why a business reader should care: this is one of the largest single financing arrangements in the AI buildout, and it became a centerpiece of the debate over “circular” financing - a chip supplier investing in a customer that then buys the supplier’s chips. It shows how deeply capital, compute, and revenue have become intertwined among the handful of firms at the center of the boom.