$100 Billion, 10 Gigawatts, 700 Million Users: The Numbers Behind Nvidia’s Earth-Shaking OpenAI Bet

The future of artificial intelligence can be told in three titanic numbers that define the new partnership between Nvidia and OpenAI: $100 billion, 10 gigawatts, and 700 million. Each figure tells a crucial part of a story about ambition, scale, and the immense power required to build the next generation of technology.
First is the headline figure: $100 billion. This is the monumental sum Nvidia is investing to solve OpenAI’s compute crisis. It’s not just a blank check; it is a strategic investment that makes Nvidia an equity holder, forever linking the chipmaker’s success to the AI lab’s breakthroughs. To accelerate the process, $10 billion of this amount is tied directly to the activation of the project’s first phase.
The second number is 10 gigawatts. This represents the sheer, unprecedented scale of the planned AI infrastructure. A gigawatt is a billion watts of power. Building a 10-gigawatt facility is an engineering feat on par with constructing a fleet of power stations, all dedicated to a single purpose: powering OpenAI’s models on Nvidia’s upcoming Vera Rubin platform. This is the “AI factory” that will end the company’s resource shortage.
The final number is 700 million. This is the human scale of the problem. It is the number of weekly users whose voracious demand for AI pushed OpenAI’s systems to the breaking point and made this historic deal necessary. This massive user base is both OpenAI’s greatest asset and its biggest operational challenge, and this investment is designed to serve them now and for years to come.
Taken together, these numbers paint a vivid picture of the new reality in Silicon Valley. The era of building groundbreaking AI in a small lab is over. Today, it requires a nine-figure investment, infrastructure on the scale of a national power grid, and the pressure of a user base larger than the population of most continents.