A smartphone with a displayed NVIDIA logo is placed on a computer motherboard in this illustration taken March 6, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

(Reuters) -Nvidia will invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI and supply it with data center chips, the companies said on Monday, marking a tie-up between two of the highest-profile players in the global artificial intelligence race.

The move underscores the increasingly overlapping interests of the various tech giants developing advanced AI systems. The deal gives Nvidia a financial stake in the most prominent AI company in the world, which is already an important customer.

The investment gives OpenAI the cash and access it needs to buy advanced chips it needs in the first place to maintain its dominance in an increasingly competitive landscape.

The deal will involve two separate but intertwined transactions, according to a person close to OpenAI. The startup will pay Nvidia in cash for chips, while Nvidia will invest in OpenAI for non-controlling shares, the person said.

The first $10 billion of Nvidia's investment will begin once the two sides reach a definitive agreement for OpenAI to purchase Nvidia systems. OpenAI was most recently valued at $500 billion.

Nvidia will start delivering hardware as soon as late 2026, with the first gigawatt of computing power to be deployed in the second half of that year on its Vera Rubin platform.

"Everything starts with compute," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a 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."

The two companies signed a letter of intent to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems for OpenAI's AI infrastructure and said they aim to finalize partnership details in the coming weeks.

Nvidia shares rose as much as 4.4% after the announcement to a record intraday high, while Oracle gained about 5%. Oracle is working with OpenAI, SoftBank and Microsoft on the $500 billion Stargate project, a plan to build massive AI data centers around the world.

"Demand for Nvidia GPUs is effectively baked into the development of frontier AI models, and deals like this should also ease concerns about lost sales in China," said eMarketer analyst Jacob Bourne.

"It also throws cold water on the idea that rival chipmakers or in-house silicon from the big tech platforms are anywhere close to disrupting Nvidia's lead."

BROADER INDUSTRY MOVES

The pact is the latest in a series of agreements between major technology players. Microsoft has invested billions in OpenAI since 2019, and Nvidia last week unveiled a collaboration with Intel on AI chips. Nvidia also committed $5 billion to Intel earlier this month and backed OpenAI in a $6.6 billion funding round in October 2024.

The scale of Nvidia's latest commitment could attract antitrust scrutiny. The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission reached a deal in mid-2024 that cleared the way for potential probes into the roles of Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia in the AI industry. However, the Trump administration has so far taken a lighter approach to competition issues than the Biden administration.

OpenAI and its main backer Microsoft also announced earlier this month that they had signed a non-binding agreement to restructure OpenAI into a for-profit entity, signaling further changes in the governance of the fast-growing AI company.

CUSTOM CHIP THREAT

OpenAI was working on a custom chip with Broadcom and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, Reuters reported earlier this year, as the training-focused chip is viewed as a strategic tool to strengthen its negotiating leverage with other chip suppliers.

Broadcom shares were down 0.5% after the news. However, the deal does not change any of OpenAI's ongoing compute plans, including its partnership with Microsoft or its efforts to build its own chips, a person familiar with the matter said.

Rivals such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft have also invested in designing their own AI accelerators, part of a broader push to diversify away from Nvidia chips, which remain in short supply.

(Reporting by Arsheeya Bajwa and Akash Sriram in Bengaluru and Deepa Seetharaman and Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Tasim Zahid and Anil D'Silva)