NVIDIA cemented its position as the world’s valuable company, hitting a record high after announcing it would invest up to US$100 billion (A$151 billion) in OpenAI and supply it with computer chips for a major data centre expansion.
The technology giants announced a letter of intent for a strategic partnership to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems for OpenAI to train and run its next generation of artificial intelligence (AI) models, marking the latest development in the global AI boom.
This is equal to between four million and five million graphics processing units (GPUs), the same volume as NVIDIA will ship this year and twice as much as last year, Founder and CEO Jensen Huang was quoted in a CNBC article as saying in an interview.
NVIDIA is understood to be paying current market prices for its stake in OpenAI, the privately-owned developer of the ChatGPT program that simulates a conversation with a person.
“To support this deployment including data centre and power capacity, NVIDIA intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as the new NVIDIA systems are deployed,” the companies said in a press release.
The first phase is targeted to come online in the second half of 2026 with the details to be finalised in the coming weeks.
“This is a giant project,” Huang said in the interview.
AI models are computer programs that generate human-like language by studying large amounts of text from websites, articles and books and are used to for tasks like text generation, code writing, summarisation, and translation.
NVIDIA shares closed $6.94 (3.93%) higher at $183.61 on Monday (Tuesday AEST), capitalising the largest of the so-called Magnificent Seven technology giants at $4.46 trillion, after earlier touching a new high of $184.55.
NVIDIA last week announced it would take a US$5 billion (A$7.6 billion) stake in its struggling smaller rival Intel Corp as part of a collaboration between the two technology companies.
