Catenaa, Thursday, September 25, 2025– Nvidia investment in OpenAI will put billions of dollars into the coffers of the AI startup to use as it sees fit, and will go towards the use of Nvidia’s cutting-edge chips.
The agreement between the two companies was big on numbers but thin on specifics. They said the investment would reach up to $100 billion, paid out as AI supercomputing facilities open in the coming years, with the first one coming online in the second half of 2026.
The timing of the buildouts and the cost of each data center remain up in the air. However, what’s become clear is that OpenAI plans to pay for Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) through lease arrangements, rather than upfront purchases, CNBC reported.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who described this week’s deal as “monumental in size,” has estimated that an AI data center with a gigawatt of capacity costs roughly $50 billion, with $35 billion of that used to pay for Nvidia’s GPUs.
By leasing the processors, OpenAI can spread its costs out over the useful life of the GPUs, which could be up to five years, the report said, leaving Nvidia to bear more of the risk.
Nvidia agreed to invest over time as OpenAI’s data centers get up and running. The initial $10 billion will be available to OpenAI soon and help the company work towards deploying its first gigawatt of capacity.
While Nvidia’s equity investment could help OpenAI with hiring, marketing, and operations, the biggest single item it will be used for is compute, the people said. And that’s almost entirely directed at Nvidia’s GPUs, which are key to building and training large language models and running AI workloads.
Nvidia’s march to a $4.3 trillion market cap has been driven by GPU sales to OpenAI as well as to tech megacaps like Google, Meta, Microsoft,and Amazon.
OpenAI’s path to a $500 billion private market valuation has been enabled by hefty investments from Microsoft and others that allow the company to burn billions of dollars in cash while building its AI models that power services, including ChatGPT.
