OpenAI and NVIDIA have announced plans for a major strategic partnership that will see at least 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems deployed to support OpenAI’s next-generation AI models.

The two companies signed a letter of intent outlining the agreement, which is aimed at creating the infrastructure needed to train and operate OpenAI’s future AI systems on the path towards superintelligence. To deliver the project, including data centre capacity and power, NVIDIA has committed to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as the systems are rolled out.

The first phase of deployment is expected to go live in the second half of 2026 using NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin platform.

“NVIDIA and OpenAI have pushed each other for a decade, from the first DGX supercomputer to the breakthrough of ChatGPT,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “This investment and infrastructure partnership mark the next leap forward—deploying 10 gigawatts to power the next era of intelligence.”

OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman highlighted the central role of computing capacity in the deal. “Everything starts with compute,” he said. “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.”

“We’ve been working closely with NVIDIA since the early days of OpenAI,” said Greg Brockman, co-founder and President of OpenAI. “We’ve utilized their platform to create AI systems that hundreds of millions of people use every day. We’re excited to deploy 10 gigawatts of compute with NVIDIA to push back the frontier of intelligence and scale the benefits of this technology to everyone.”

As part of the agreement, OpenAI will name NVIDIA its preferred partner for compute and networking as it grows its AI factory capacity. The companies will also align their development roadmaps, combining OpenAI’s model and infrastructure software with NVIDIA’s hardware and software.

The partnership builds on existing collaborations with Microsoft, Oracle, SoftBank and Stargate partners, all working towards creating the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure.

OpenAI currently reports more than 700 million weekly active users across businesses, developers and consumers globally. The partnership is expected to accelerate its goal of building artificial general intelligence that benefits all of humanity.

Both companies said they plan to finalise the details of the agreement in the coming weeks.