NVIDIA and OpenAI Forge the World’s Largest AI Infrastructure Deployment
The technology landscape just shifted dramatically. NVIDIA and OpenAI have unveiled what’s being described as the largest AI infrastructure project in history. This bold partnership aims to build multi-gigawatt data centres powered by millions of NVIDIA GPUs, setting the stage for the next era of artificial intelligence across industries.
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang captured the scale of this undertaking in an interview with CNBC’s Jon Fortt: “This is the biggest AI infrastructure project in history. This partnership is about building an AI infrastructure that enables AI to go from the labs into the world.”
Scaling AI Beyond the Lab
At the heart of the collaboration is a commitment to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems, including the company’s Vera Rubin platform, to power OpenAI’s next-generation infrastructure. The ambition is clear: to provide the computational backbone for training and inference at a level previously unimaginable.
NVIDIA is also putting financial weight behind the project, with plans to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as each gigawatt of capacity is rolled out. It’s a scale rarely seen in technology investments, signalling how seriously both companies view the future of AI.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was unequivocal about the choice of partner: “There’s no partner but NVIDIA that can do this at this kind of scale, at this kind of speed.”
Meeting Unprecedented AI Demand
Since ChatGPT became the fastest-growing app in history in 2022, OpenAI’s user base has surged past 700 million weekly active users. New capabilities such as agentic AI, multimodal reasoning, and extended context windows are creating demand for infrastructure that can handle training and inference on an unprecedented scale.
Altman explained the challenge in stark terms: “Without enough computational resources, 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.” The answer, he added, lies in building “much more capacity so that we can serve the massive need and opportunity.”
The Rise of Million-GPU Factories
The agreement centres on building AI factories equipped with millions of NVIDIA GPUs. These massive facilities will underpin OpenAI’s ability to develop the next frontier of AI models. According to Altman: “Building this infrastructure is critical to everything we want to do. This is the fuel that we need to drive improvement, drive better models, drive revenue, drive everything.”
The first gigawatt of NVIDIA Vera Rubin-powered systems is expected to start producing tokens in the second half of 2026. That milestone will represent the beginning of a global buildout that Huang says will eventually connect intelligence to every application, device, and use case.
From Hand-Delivered Servers to Billion-Fold Scale
The announcement is also a testament to how far the collaboration between the two companies has come. Back in 2016, Huang personally delivered the first NVIDIA DGX system to OpenAI. Less than a decade later, the scale is almost incomprehensible.
OpenAI president Greg Brockman highlighted the leap: “This is a billion times more computational power than that initial server. 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.”
Global Implications for Industry and Society
The implications extend well beyond technology firms. By bringing intelligence at scale to industries from healthcare to construction, energy to transportation, the partnership promises to transform productivity, accelerate discovery, and open new possibilities for digital economies worldwide.
Huang left no doubt about the ambition: “We’re literally going to connect intelligence to every application, to every use case, to every device, and we’re just at the beginning. This is the first 10 gigawatts, I assure you of that.”
A New Chapter in AI Evolution
For both NVIDIA and OpenAI, this partnership represents more than just infrastructure. It marks a pivotal step toward making artificial intelligence an everyday utility, as central to the global economy as electricity or the internet.
The journey may have started with a single hand-delivered server, but it’s now scaling into a worldwide network of million-GPU factories designed to fuel human progress.
