By Obinna Uballa
OpenAI and Nvidia struck a $100 billion partnership that cements their dominance at the core of the artificial intelligence boom, a deal hammered out in frantic last-minute negotiations between Sam Altman and Jensen Huang.
The agreement, finalised just hours before Altman flew to Texas to unveil OpenAI’s next big infrastructure push, binds the world’s most valuable startup more closely to the $4.5 trillion chipmaking giant, CBN reported.
Huang called the pact “monumental in size,” while Altman described it as key to tackling AI’s “unprecedented infrastructure challenge.”
Reports said the deal was clinched after weeks of late-night calls, back-and-forth meetings in London, San Francisco and Washington, and even quiet conversations during United States President Donald Trump’s state visit to the United Kingdom last week, which both men attended.
Under the arrangement, Nvidia will inject $10 billion tranches into OpenAI, starting at a locked $500 billion valuation, while supplying the GPUs to power a planned 10-gigawatt network of supercomputing sites under OpenAI’s “Stargate” expansion, the report said.
Successive rounds will follow as new capacity comes online, eventually totalling $100 billion.
The pact marks a deepening of a relationship that began in 2016, when Huang personally delivered Nvidia’s first DGX supercomputer to OpenAI’s modest San Francisco office, it was gathered.
Nearly a decade later, the two companies stand at the pinnacle of global tech, Nvidia as Wall Street’s most valuable stock and OpenAI as the world’s most influential AI company.
But the deal adds new complexity to OpenAI’s web of alliances. Microsoft, its largest shareholder and key cloud partner, was only informed a day before signing, according CNBC report.
Oracle recently disclosed a $300 billion compute commitment with OpenAI starting in 2027, while SoftBank and Oracle are also backing Stargate’s infrastructure rollout.
Executives said the first supercomputing site will go live in late 2026, after reviewing more than 700 locations across North America. Financing beyond Nvidia’s stake will include debt, as OpenAI seeks to avoid excessive dilution while exploring whether to evolve into a first-party cloud provider.
For Huang, the $100 billion bet extends Nvidia’s aggressive push into infrastructure. In recent weeks, the company invested $5 billion into Intel for a joint chip venture and $700 million into U.K. startup Nscale, following its backing of U.S. AI cloud firm CoreWeave.
As Altman’s team pursued parallel financing talks in Tokyo with SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, the scale of the ambition became clear: Stargate is now the umbrella for every major OpenAI infrastructure project. With Nvidia as “preferred partner”, but not exclusive, OpenAI is setting the stage for the next phase of the AI race, reports said.
“Expect a lot from us in the coming months,” Altman said.
