NVIDIA shares surge 4%, hit record high on investing $100 billion in OpenAI

Shares of the chip giant NVIDIA rose as much as 4.46% to hit a record high of $184.55 on Nasdaq on Monday, September 22, after the company said it will invest $100 billion in OpenAI and supply it with data centre chips, marking a deal between the two high profile players in the global artificial intelligence race.

The move highlights the increasingly overlapping interests of the various tech giants developing advanced AI systems. The deal gives chipmaker NVIDIA a financial stake in the world's most prominent AI company, which is already an important customer, news agency Reuters reported.

With Monday's surge NVIDIA’s market capitalisation touched a record high of $4.46 trillion making it the most valuable company in the world.

The deal will involve two separate but intertwined transactions, according to a person close to OpenAI. Nvidia will start investing in OpenAI for non-voting shares once the deal is finalized, then OpenAI can use the cash to buy NVIDIA’s chips, the person said, Reuters report added.

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

“NVIDIA and OpenAI have pushed each other for a decade, from the first DGX supercomputer to the breakthrough of ChatGPT,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “This investment and infrastructure partnership mark the next leap forward — deploying 10 gigawatts to power the next era of intelligence.”

“Everything starts with compute,” said Sam Altman, cofounder and CEO of OpenAI. “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.”

OpenAI has grown to over 700 million weekly active users and strong adoption across global enterprises, small businesses and developers. This partnership will help OpenAI advance its mission to build artificial general intelligence that benefits all of humanity. NVIDIA and OpenAI look forward to finalizing the details of this new phase of strategic partnership in the coming weeks, the company said in a press release.

NVIDIA shares ended 3.93% higher at $183.61, outperforming the NASDAQ which ended 0.7% higher.