Nvidia’s investment in OpenAI will be in cash, and most will be used to lease Nvidia chips
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks to media following a Q&A at the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.
Shelby Tauber | Reuters
Nvidia’s massive investment in OpenAI, announced earlier this week, will put billions of dollars into the coffers of the artificial intelligence startup to use as it sees fit. But most of the money will go towards use of Nvidia’s cutting-edge chips.
The agreement between the two companies was big on numbers but thin on specifics. They said the investment would reach up to $100 billion, paid out as AI supercomputing facilities open in the coming years, with the first one coming online in the second half of 2026.
The timing of the buildouts and the cost of each data center remains up in the air. However, what’s become clear is that OpenAI plans to pay for Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) through lease arrangements, rather than upfront purchases, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not be named because the details are private.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who described this week’s deal as “monumental in size,” has estimated that an AI data center with a gigawatt of capacity costs roughly $50 billion, with $35 billion of that used to pay for Nvidia’s GPUs. By leasing the processors, OpenAI can spread its costs out over the useful life of the GPUs, which could be up to five years a person said, leaving Nvidia to bear more of the risk.
The Information previously reported on some aspects of the lease arrangement.
Nvidia agreed to invest over time as OpenAI’s data centers get up and running. The initial $10 billion will be available to OpenAI soon, and help the company work towards deploying its first gigawatt of capacity, a source told CNBC.
While Nvidia’s equity investment could help OpenAI with hiring, marketing and operations, the biggest single item it will be used for is compute, the people said. And that’s almost entirely directed at Nvidia’s GPUs, which are key to building and training large language models and for running AI workloads.
As a non-investment-grade startup that lacks positive cash flow, financing remains costly. OpenAI executives have called equity the most expensive way to fund data centers, and said that the company is preparing to take on debt to cover the remainder of the expansion.
In addition to offering a cost-efficient way for OpenAI to access chips, Nvidia’s lease option and long-term commitment can help the company land better terms from banks when it comes to raising debt, a person said.
An Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment.
‘They will get paid’
Speaking to CNBC in Abilene, Texas, home to the first new data center, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar pointed to the role Oracle and Nvidia are playing in the financing. Oracle, one of OpenAI’s partners on the Stargate project, is leasing the Abilene facility, and OpenAI will eventually pay for the operations.
“Folks like Oracle are putting their balance sheets to work to create these incredible data centers you see behind us,” Friar said. “In Nvidia’s case, they’re putting together some equity to get it jumpstarted, but importantly, they will get paid for all those chips as those chips get deployed.”
She said all the big partners are needed to help relieve a dramatic shortage of capacity.
“What I think we should all be focused on today is the fact that there’s not enough compute,” Friar said. “As the business grows, we will be more than capable of paying for what is in our future — more compute, more revenue.”
The steel frame of data centers under construction during a tour of the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.
Shelby Tauber | Reuters
Still, the OpenAI-Nvidia deal has raised some concerns about the sustainability of the AI boom.
Nvidia’s march to a $4.3 trillion market cap has been driven by GPU sales to OpenAI as well as to tech megacaps like Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon. OpenAI’s path to a $500 billion private market valuation has been enabled by hefty investments from Microsoft and others that allow the company to burn billions of dollars in cash while building its AI models that power services including ChatGPT.
Jamie Zakalik, an analyst at Neuberger Berman, said the Nvidia deal is the latest example of OpenAI raising money that it pours right back into the company providing the capital.
Investors are concerned about the “circular nature of this deal goosing up everyone’s earnings and everyone’s numbers,” said Zakalik. “But it’s not actually creating anything.”
Asked about those fears, Altman told CNBC the company is focused on driving real demand.
“We need to keep selling services to consumers and businesses — and building these great new products that people pay us a lot of money for,” he said. “As long as that keeps happening, that pays for a lot of these data centers, a lot of chips.”
— CNBC’s Kif Leswing contributed to this report
WATCH: Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank unveil Stargate data center expansion
Michael Intrator, co-founder and chief executive officer of CoreWeave Inc., during an interview on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, US, on Monday, Sept. 22, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
CoreWeave on Thursday announced a $6.5 billion deal with OpenAI, expanding its current agreement with the artificial intelligence startup behind ChatGPT.
The new agreement brings the AI cloud infrastructure provider’s total contracts with OpenAI to $22.5 billion.
“This milestone affirms the trust that world-leading innovators have in CoreWeave’s ability to power the most demanding inference and training workloads at an unmatched pace,” CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator said in a statement.
In March, CoreWeave announced an $11.9-billion agreement with OpenAI to provide AI datacenters and technology over five years. Intrator told CNBC in May that the companies expanded the agreement by $4 billion.
CoreWeave, which went public in March, makes money by renting out data centers packed with numerous Nvidia graphics processing units. The company is backed by Nvidia and makes a significant chunk of its revenue from Microsoft, which is a key investor in OpenAI.
At the time of its prospectus, CoreWeave said it operated 32 datacenters powered over 250,000 Nvidia GPUs.
Earlier this month, CoreWeave’s share price popped after the company disclosed a $6.3 billion order from Nvidia.
WATCH: CoreWeave CEO: Building AI infrastructure will require trillions in public-private investment
Technology
Databricks commits to $100 million in OpenAI spending as high-valued startups team up in AI
Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi.
Databricks
OpenAI and Databricks are two of the most highly valued tech startups on the planet. Now they’re working together.
Databricks, a data analytics software vendor, said Thursday that it has committed to spending $100 million over multiple years with OpenAI. Databricks is making it easier for customers to connect their data stored in its cloud service with GPT-5, announced in August, and other OpenAI models.
OpenAI, which was recently valued by private investors at $500 billion, has become a household name in the years since the launch of its ChatGPT in late 2022. In partnering with Databricks, valued at more than $100 billion in its latest funding round, OpenAI has landed its first formal integration with a business-focused product vendor, said Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s operating chief, in a news conference Wednesday.
Lightcap said the company’s “aspiration is a multiple” of the $100 million spending commitment in terms of revenue the agreement will generate.
Databricks has formed similar partnerships with Google and with Anthropic. But OpenAI is leading the way with more than 700 million people using its ChatGPT assistant, powered by GPT-5, every week.
The company was making enterprise more of a focus even before the Databricks deal. Microsoft has been bringing OpenAI models into businesses, governments and schools. And OpenAI has been building up its own sales function.
Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi said the partnership will simplify the process for its customers when it comes to accessing OpenAI’s models, which they’ve already been using in large numbers.
Until now, if a Databricks customer wanted to tap a proprietary OpenAI model to help analyze internal data, it would have required extensive configuration, as well as legal and security sign-off.
“The key difference here is that any database customer automatically now, just by clicking in the UI, can start using this product,” Ghodsi said, referring to the user interface. Ghodsi said the price is similar to what it would cost if the user went directly to OpenAI.
Greg Ulrich, Mastercard‘s chief AI and data officer, said he’s optimistic about the integration.
“It enables opportunity for research and targeted experimentation, using AI to solve new problems, bringing value to customers, enhancing employee productivity, in an environment that we trust, that we know,” Ulrich said.
It’s an increasingly competitive space.
Databricks rival Snowflake, which has a market cap of $75 billion, announced an expansion of its Microsoft partnership in February, enabling the use of OpenAI models. Oracle, which has a $300 billion cloud contract from OpenAI, said two weeks ago that in October it will launch a service for running Google, OpenAI and xAI models on data stored in its database software.
Databricks said earlier this month that it now generates more than $4 billion in annualized revenue, growing over 50% year over year, with $1 billion coming from AI products. The company’s $100 billion valuation was announced alongside a $1 billion funding round.
OpenAI and Databricks ranked No. 2 and No. 3, respectively, on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list.
WATCH: Databricks CEO: ‘Agentic’ AI era will disrupt the whole database industry
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