
OpenAI and NVIDIA just announced a landmark AI infrastructure partnership - an initiative that will scale OpenAI's compute with multi-gigawatt data centers powered by millions of NVIDIA GPUs.
To discuss what this means for the next generation of AI development and deployment, the two companies' CEOs, and the president of OpenAI, spoke this morning with CNBC's Jon Fortt.
This is the biggest AI infrastructure project in history, said NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang in the interview. This partnership is about building an AI infrastructure that enables AI to go from the labs into the world.
Through the partnership, OpenAI will deploy at least 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems for OpenAI's next-generation AI infrastructure, including the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform. NVIDIA also intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI progressively as each gigawatt is deployed.
There's no partner but NVIDIA that can do this at this kind of scale, at this kind of speed, said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.
The million-GPU AI factories built through this agreement will help OpenAI meet the training and inference demands of its next frontier of AI models.
Building this infrastructure is critical to everything we want to do, Altman said. This is the fuel that we need to drive improvement, drive better models, drive revenue, drive everything.
(L to R): OpenAI President Greg Brockman, NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Building Million-GPU Infrastructure to Meet AI Demand Since the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT - which in 2022 became the fastest application in history to reach 100 million users - the company has grown its user base to more than 700 million weekly active users and delivered increasingly advanced capabilities, including support for agentic AI, AI reasoning, multimodal data and longer context windows.
To support its next phase of growth, the company's AI infrastructure must scale up to meet not only training but inference demands of the most advanced models for agentic and reasoning AI users worldwide.
The cost per unit of intelligence will keep falling and falling and falling, and we think that's great, said Altman. But on the other side, the frontier of AI, maximum intellectual capability, is going up and up. And that enables more and more use - and a lot of it.
Without enough computational resources, Altman explained, people would have to choose between impactful use cases, for example either researching a cancer cure or offering free education.
No one wants to make that choice, he said. And so increasingly, as we see this, the answer is just much more capacity so that we can serve the massive need and opportunity.
In 2016, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang hand-delivered the first NVIDIA DGX system to OpenAI's headquarters in San Francisco. The first gigawatt of NVIDIA systems built with NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs will generate their first tokens in the second half of 2026.
The partnership expands on a long-standing collaboration between NVIDIA and OpenAI, which began with Huang hand-delivering the first NVIDIA DGX system to the company in 2016.
This is a billion times more computational power than that initial server, said Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI. We're able to actually create new breakthroughs, new models to empower every individual and business because we'll be able to reach the next level of scale.
Huang emphasized that though this is the start of a massive buildout of AI infrastructure around the world, it's just the beginning.
We're literally going to connect intelligence to every application, to every use case, to every device - and we're just at the beginning, Huang said. This is the first 10 gigawatts, I assure you of that.
Watch the CNBC interview below.
More from Nvidia
04/12/2025
Developers, researchers, hobbyists and students can take a byte out of holiday s...
04/12/2025
Editor's note: The Game Pass edition of Hogwarts Legacy' will also be supported on GeForce NOW when the Steam and Epic Games Store versions launch on t...
03/12/2025
The top 10 most intelligent open-source models all use a mixture-of-experts arch...
02/12/2025
Today, Mistral AI announced the Mistral 3 family of open-source multilingual, multimodal models, optimized across NVIDIA supercomputing and edge platforms.
M...
02/12/2025
At AWS re:Invent, NVIDIA and Amazon Web Services expanded their strategic collab...
01/12/2025
Researchers worldwide rely on open-source technologies as the foundation of their work. To equip the community with the latest advancements in digital and physi...
27/11/2025
Black Friday is leveling up. Get ready to score one of the biggest deals of the season - 50% off the first three months of a new GeForce NOW Ultimate membership...
25/11/2025
Black Forest Labs - the frontier AI research lab developing visual generative AI models - today released the FLUX.2 family of state-of-the-art image generation ...
24/11/2025
Editor's note: This post is part of the AI On blog series, which explores the latest techniques and real-world applications of agentic AI, chatbots and copi...
20/11/2025
Editor's note: This post is part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused on how developers, 3D practitioners and enterprises can transform their workflows u...
20/11/2025
The NVIDIA Blackwell RTX upgrade is nearing the finish line, letting GeForce NOW Ultimate members across the globe experience true next-generation cloud gaming ...
20/11/2025
Tanya Berger-Wolf's first computational biology project started as a bet wit...
18/11/2025
Timed with the Microsoft Ignite conference running this week, NVIDIA is expandin...
18/11/2025
Today, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Anthropic announced new strategic partnerships. Anthropic is scaling its rapidly growing Claude AI model on Microsoft Azure, powere...
18/11/2025
AI agents have the potential to become indispensable tools for automating complex tasks. But bringing agents to production remains challenging.
According to Ga...
17/11/2025
NVIDIA Apollo - a family of open models for accelerating industrial and computat...
17/11/2025
To power future technologies including liquid-cooled data centers, high-resoluti...
17/11/2025
At SC25, NVIDIA unveiled advances across NVIDIA BlueField DPUs, next-generation networking, quantum computing, national research, AI physics and more - as accel...
17/11/2025
Across quantum physics, digital biology and climate research, the world's researchers are harnessing a universal scientific instrument to chart new frontier...
17/11/2025
It used to be that computing power trickled down from hulking supercomputers to ...
14/11/2025
Today's AI workloads are data-intensive, requiring more scalable and afforda...
13/11/2025
Editor's note: This post is part of the AI On blog series, which explores the latest techniques and real-world applications of agentic AI, chatbots and copi...
13/11/2025
Chaos has entered the chat. It's GFN Thursday, and things are getting intense with the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, streaming at launch this week on...
12/11/2025
In the age of AI reasoning, training smarter, more capable models is critical to scaling intelligence. Delivering the massive performance to meet this new age r...
12/11/2025
Large language model (LLM)-based AI assistants are powerful productivity tools, but without the right context and information, they can struggle to provide nuan...
10/11/2025
Editor's note: This post is part of Think SMART, a series focused on how lea...
06/11/2025
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang and chief scientist Bill Dally were honored ...
06/11/2025
Editor's note: This blog has been updated to reflect the correct launch date for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7', November 14.
A crisp chill's in the...
04/11/2025
In Berlin on Tuesday, Deutsche Telekom and NVIDIA unveiled the world's first...
04/11/2025
When inspiration strikes, nothing kills momentum faster than a slow tool or a frozen timeline. Creative apps should feel fast and fluid - an extension of imagin...
03/11/2025
Two out of every three people are likely to be living in cities or other urban c...
31/10/2025
Amidst Gyeongju, South Korea's ancient temples and modern skylines, Jensen H...
30/10/2025
An unassuming van driving around rural India uses powerful AI technology that...
30/10/2025
Get ready, raiders - the wait is over. ARC Raiders is dropping onto GeForce NOW and bringing the fight from orbit to the screen.
To celebrate the launch, gamer...
29/10/2025
Editor's note: This post is part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused on ...
28/10/2025
Governments everywhere are racing to harness the power of AI - but legacy infras...
28/10/2025
AI is moving from the digital world into the physical one. Across factory floors...
28/10/2025
NVIDIA is delivering the telecom industry a major boost in open-source software for building AI-native 5G and 6G networks.
NVIDIA Aerial software will soon be ...
28/10/2025
The race to bottle a star now runs on AI.
NVIDIA, General Atomics and a team of international partners have built a high-fidelity, AI-enabled digital twin for ...
28/10/2025
Along the Pacific Ocean in Monterey, California, the Naval Postgraduate School (...
28/10/2025
To democratize access to AI technology nationwide, AI education and deployment c...
28/10/2025
Leading technology companies in aerospace and automotive are accelerating their ...
26/10/2025
This year's ROSCon conference heads to Singapore, bringing together the global robotics developer community behind Robot Operating System (ROS) - the world&...
24/10/2025
Monday, Oct. 27, 12:30 p.m.
How Medium-Sized Cities Are Tackling AI Readiness
L to R: Mark Muro, senior fellow at Brookings Metro; Micah Runner, city manag...
23/10/2025
The nights grow longer and the shadows get bolder with Vampire The Masquerade: B...
21/10/2025
Coastal communities in the U.S. have a 26% chance of flooding within a 30-year period. This percentage is expected to increase due to climate-change-driven sea-...
20/10/2025
NVIDIA and Google Cloud are expanding access to accelerated computing to transform the full spectrum of enterprise workloads, from visual computing to agentic a...
17/10/2025
As Open Source AI Week comes to a close, we're celebrating the innovation, c...
17/10/2025
AI has ignited a new industrial revolution.
NVIDIA and TSMC are working togethe...
16/10/2025
GeForce NOW is more than just a platform to stream fresh games every week - it offers celebrations for the gamers who make it epic, with member rewards to sweet...