American tech giant, Nvidia, has announced plans to invest up to $100 billion in the ChatGPT maker, in a deal that makes it a co-builder of the infrastructure that will power the next wave of artificial intelligence or AI.

With the plan, the chipmaker is going all-in with chips and cash to help build modern data centers which it has referred as “AI factories” in recent years.

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Nvidia and OpenAI on Monday announced that the chipmaker plans to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI through a staged partnership that makes Nvidia a co-builder of the infrastructure that will power the next wave of artificial intelligence.

The deal also guarantees the startup first dibs on the world’s most coveted GPUs.

Under the deal, Nvidia will pour in money gigawatt by gigawatt as OpenAI builds data centers stocked with millions of its chips. The first of those, running on Nvidia’s coming Vera Rubin platform, is slated to switch on in the second half of 2026.

By the time the build-out hits 10 gigawatts which is about the output of several nuclear reactors in the United States, OpenAI will be operating the kind of compute grid that is usually reserved for national utilities.

The deal is part supplier agreement, part financing package; and has a moat big enough to make rivals sweat.

The investment and mode of deployment of cash, it was explained, is by a letter-of-intent to invest progressively as each gigawatt is deployed. The process is designed to make cash available at each time when concrete, power, racks, and GPUs become available.

In return, OpenAI names Nvidia its preferred strategic compute and networking partner, aligning hardware and software roadmaps so that model releases and silicon arrive in lockstep.