At nearly the same moment as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was expressing surprise over OpenAI’s multibillion-dollar deal with competitor AMD — shortly after his company agreed to invest up to $100 billion into the AI model maker — Sam Altman was saying that more such deals are in the works.
Huang appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Wednesday. When asked if he knew about the AMD deal before it was announced, he answered, “Not really.”
As TechCrunch previously reported, OpenAI’s deal with AMD is unusual. AMD has agreed to grant OpenAI large tranches of AMD stock — up to 10% of the company over a period of years contingent on factors like increases in stock price. In exchange, OpenAI will use and help develop the chipmaker’s next-generation AI GPUs chips. This makes OpenAI a shareholder in AMD.
Nvidia’s deal is the reverse. Nvidia has invested in the AI model-making startup, making it a shareholder in OpenAI.
While OpenAI has been using Nvidia gear for years through cloud providers like Microsoft Azure, Oracle OCI, and CoreWeave, “This is the first time we’re going to sell directly to them,” Huang explained. He added that his company would still continue to supply gear to the cloud makers, too.
These direct sales, which include AI gear beyond GPUs like systems and networking, are intended to “prepare” OpenAI for the day when it is its own “self-hosted hyperscaler,” Huang said. In other words, when it’s using its own data centers.
But Huang admits that OpenAI doesn’t “have the money yet” to pay for all of this gear. He estimated that each gigawatt of AI data center will cost OpenAI “$50 to $60 billion,” to cover everything from the land and power to the servers and equipment.
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So far, in 2025, OpenAI has commissioned 10 gigawatts’ worth of U.S. facilities through its $500 billion Stargate deal with partners Oracle and SoftBank. (Plus, it penned a $300 billion cloud deal with Oracle.)
Its partnership with Nvidia was for at least 10 gigawatts of AI data centers. Its partnership with AMD was for 6 gigawatts. Plus its “Stargate UK” partnership involves expanding data centers in the U.K., and it has other European commitments. By some estimates, OpenAI has this year inked $1 trillion worth of such deals.
Similar to the AMD deal, Nvidia’s deal has been criticized for being so-called “circular,” Bloomberg reported. The critics say Nvidia is essentially underwriting OpenAI’s purchases, getting the AI startup’s stock for its efforts.
Altman to the world: Expect more
As Huang was dissecting OpenAI’s infrastructure needs on CNBC, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s interview with Andreessen Horowitz’s The a16z Podcast dropped.
During the pod, a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz told Altman that he’s “very impressed by deal structure improvement” referring to these most recent deals. A16z is an OpenAI investor, so it would be shocking if he wasn’t impressed. OpenAI has found a way to potentially obtain billions of dollars of equipment on someone else’s dime. Repeatedly.
When asked about these recent deals, Altman said, “You should expect much more from us in the coming months.”
Altman sees OpenAI’s future models and upcoming other products as so much more capable, thereby fueling so much more demand, that “we have decided that it is time to go make a very aggressive infrastructure bet,” he explained.
The problem is that OpenAI’s revenue today is currently nowhere near a $1 trillion though it is, by all accounts, growing rapidly, reportedly hitting $4.5 billion in the first half of 2025.
Yet Altman obviously believes that eventually all of this investment will pay for itself. “I’ve never been more confident in the research road map in front of us and also the economic value that will come from using those [future] models.”
But, he said, OpenAI can’t get to all of that economic lushness on its own.
“To make the bet at this scale we kind of need the whole industry, or big chunk of the industry, to support it. And this is from the level of electrons to model distribution and all the stuff in between, which is a lot. So we’re going to partner with a lot a lot of people,” Altman said, with more deals expected in the coming months.
So stand by, tech industry. OpenAI is still wheeling and dealing.
