Nvidia announces $100 billion strategic partnership with OpenAI, shares climb

Investing.com -- Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) stock rose 4.5% to an intraday record on Monday after the AI chip giant announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI to deploy 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems for the ChatGPT maker’s next-generation AI infrastructure.

As part of the agreement, Nvidia intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI progressively as each gigawatt is deployed. The first gigawatt of Nvidia systems is scheduled for deployment in the second half of 2026 on the Nvidia Vera Rubin platform.

The partnership aims to support OpenAI’s efforts to train and run its next generation of AI models. OpenAI, which has grown to over 700 million weekly active users, will work with Nvidia as a preferred strategic compute and networking partner for its AI factory growth plans.

"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."

The collaboration will involve co-optimizing roadmaps for OpenAI’s model and infrastructure software alongside Nvidia’s hardware and software. This partnership complements existing collaborations OpenAI has with other tech giants including Microsoft, Oracle, and SoftBank.

Barclays analyst Tom O’Malley noted that based on Nvidia’s second-quarter 2026 earnings commentary, 1 gigawatt equals approximately $35 billion in revenue to Nvidia, potentially translating to over $350 billion from this OpenAI partnership.

"Today’s announcement shows that we are in a compute bonanza," O’Malley said. "General purpose silicon will run the majority of OpenAI workloads at least through the end of this decade."

Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Kunjan Sobhani noted the partnership "could result in several hundreds of billions in Nvidia AI compute and networking systems revenue." Sobhani added that the scale "solidifies backlog visibility into 2026-27 and beyond" and "alleviates concerns around market-share loss and GPU demand slowing."

Not all analysts were equally optimistic. DA Davidson analyst Gil Luria expressed concern that "NVDA has become the ’investor of last resort’, bailing out OpenAI’s overextended commitments."

The deal does not change any of OpenAI’s existing compute plans, including its partnership with Microsoft or efforts to build its own chips.

Nvidia shares have risen over 30% this year and more than 50% over the past 12 months. The companies expect to finalize the details of the partnership in the coming weeks.