Nvidia is investing up to $100 billion in a partnership with OpenAI that will result in what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicts will be “the biggest AI infrastructure deployment in history.” The project will use about 10 gigawatts worth of Nvidia systems — including the upcoming Vera Rubin platform — power equivalent to 4 million to 5 million GPUs. “This partnership is about building an AI infrastructure that enables AI to go from the labs into the world,” Huang said on CNBC’s “Halftime Report,” explaining the $100 billion will be invested in stages as each gigawatt is deployed. The investment will be all-cash with Nvidia receiving an undisclosed amount of OpenAI equity.

The blockbuster deal “underscores booming demand for AI,” writes Bloomberg. Nvidia stock rose nearly 4 percent following the Monday announcement and has gained about 37 percent this year for a valuation of $4.3 trillion.

Each data center built through the venture will house roughly a million GPUs, “to help OpenAI meet the training and inference demands of its next frontier of AI models,” Nvidia said in an announcement.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who joined Huang for the “Halftime” interview, said the company’s Stargate partners — Microsoft and Oracle — are also helping “to deliver on what the world is demanding” of AI. Altman qualified “there’s no partner but Nvidia that could do this at this kind of scale, this kind of speed.”

Bloomberg predicts “the action will clearly fuel ‘circular’ concerns,” as to whether Nvidia is investing “to prop up the market and keep companies spending on its products.” Huang says he’s simply helping to meet the global need “to connect intelligence to every application, to every use case, to every device.”

“Nvidia’s first investment of $10 billion will be deployed when the first gigawatt is completed,” writes CNBC, adding that the deal “signals the magnitude of Nvidia technology that OpenAI will need to develop next-generation AI that can do more than its current models.”

The first phase of build-out from this alliance is expected to power-up in the second half of 2026, when Nvidia’s next-gen Vera Rubin systems are scheduled to ship.

In OpenAI’s own announcement, the partnership at this stage is described as “a letter of intent.”

In January, OpenAI announced it would be investing $500 billion in U.S. data centers as part of Stargate, in which SoftBank is also an investor. This month, the company signed a $300 billion data center deal with Oracle. Huang is also on a dealmaking streak, having just disclosed a $5 billion investment in Intel.