Altman, Huang negotiations that sealed $100 billion OpenAI-Nvidia deal

ABILENE, Texas – Sam Altman had a deadline. OpenAI’s CEO was headed to Texas to unveil his company’s next big infrastructure push, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wanted in on the action.

Through a series of hurried negotiations, late-night calls and last-minute contract tweaks, the two giants of artificial intelligence struck a $100 billion partnership on Monday, hours before Altman boarded his flight to Abilene, a city of about 130,000 residents roughly 180 miles west of Dallas.

It helped that Huang and Altman had been part of President Donald Trump’s state visit to the U.K. a week earlier, allowing the president to be briefed on the agreement days in advance. 

The deal, which Huang described to CNBC as “monumental in size,” marks a watershed moment in the tech industry, as capital and influence are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the two companies closest to the heart of the artificial intelligence boom.

Huang now presides over the world’s most valuable public company, worth nearly $4.5 trillion after gaining $170 billion following Monday’s announcement, while Altman runs the most prominent startup on the planet, valued at half a trillion dollars.

OpenAI’s ascent to the forefront of generative AI has relied on Nvidia’s high-powered graphics processing units (GPUs). Now the companies are more intimately linked than ever, as they plan to carve a path to jointly building the next wave of AI supercomputing facilities.

“You should expect a lot from us in the coming months,” Altman told CNBC’s Jon Fortt in an interview at Nvidia’s Silicon Valley headquarters on Monday. “There are three things that OpenAI has to do well: we have to do great AI research, we have to make these products people want to use, and we have to figure out how to do this unprecedented infrastructure challenge.”

Altman and Huang negotiated their pact largely through a mix of virtual discussions and one-on-one meetings in London, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., with no bankers involved, according to people close to the talks who declined to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

The arrangement calls for Nvidia to invest $10 billion at a time in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. As the buildout unfolds, Nvidia will also supply the cutting-edge processors powering a host of new data centers.

While OpenAI gets more intimate with Nvidia, it has to maneuver through a number of high-stakes relationships with other key partners.

OpenAI only informed Microsoft, its principal shareholder and primary cloud provider, a day before the deal was signed, the people familiar with the matter said. Earlier this year, Microsoft lost its status as OpenAI’s exclusive provider of computing capacity.

The pact also comes less than two weeks after a disclosure from Oracle indicated that OpenAI agreed to spend $300 billion in computing power with the company over about five years, starting in…