Chipmaker Nvidia announced on Monday that it is investing up to $100 billion in OpenAI.
The deal between Nvidia, the world’s highest-valued public company, and OpenAI, parent company of the ubiquitous ChatGPT, is notable considering that both startups are among the largest in their respective spaces.
But the investment comes with conditions. The two companies signed a letter of intent for a strategic partnership by which at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems would be deployed for OpenAI’s AI infrastructure to train and run its next generation of models. To support the deployment (including data center and power capacity), Nvidia will invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as the new Nvidia systems are deployed.
“Everything starts with compute,” said Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, in a written statement. “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.”
Nvidia has been on somewhat of an investment tear. So far this year, it has made at least 42 investments in private companies, either directly or through its NVentures venture arm, per Crunchbase data. That’s up slightly from the year-ago period, which was already unusually busy.
In late March, SoftBank announced that it was backing an investment of up to $40 billion in OpenAI, marking the largest venture capital investment ever.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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