Nvidia is getting close to entering a deal to invest roughly $20 billion in OpenAI’s latest funding round. The ChatGPT-maker is looking to raise $100 billion in this latest funding round, raising its valuation to $830 billion.
The OpenAI-Nvidia deal hasn’t been finalized yet.
This comes days after the Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia’s plan to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI has been stalled.
The WSJ report mentioned that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the $100 billion OpenAI investment was “never a commitment.” Huang had also privately criticized” what he has described as “a lack of discipline” in OpenAI’s business approach and expressed concern about the competition it faces from the likes of Google and Anthropic.
Huang denied the claims that he was unhappy with OpenAI, calling it “nonsense,” but reiterated that the investment won’t be over $100 billion.
READ: Nvidia stalls its $100 billion OpenAI investment (
Huang had told CNBC that the company would consider investing in OpenAI’s next fundraising round and the startup’s eventual IPO. “We will invest in the next round,” Huang told CNBC’s Jim Cramer, calling it the “largest private round ever raised in history”.
Reuters had reported earlier that OpenAI is unsatisfied with some of Nvidia’s latest artificial intelligence chips, and it has sought alternatives since last year, citing eight sources familiar with the matter.
The report mentions OpenAI over an increasing emphasis on chips used to perform specific elements of AI inference, the process when an AI model such as the one that powers the ChatGPT app responds to customer queries and requests.
While Nvidia remains, the dominant chipmaker used for training large AI models, interference has increasingly become a new front in the competition.
READ: OpenAI in talks for $60 billion investment from Amazon, Nvidia and Microsoft (
Sources told Reuters that OpenAI is not satisfied with the speed at which Nvidia’s hardware can spit out answers to ChatGPT users for specific types of problems such as software development and AI communicating with other software.
It needs new hardware that would eventually provide about 10% of OpenAI’s inference computing needs in the future, according to one of the sources. Nvidia CEO Sam Altman responded to this in an X post, saying Nvidia makes “the best AI chips in the world” and that OpenAI hoped to remain a “gigantic customer for a very long time”.
OpenAI is also preparing for an initial public offering (IPO) of up to $1 trillion. This could potentially be one of the biggest IPOs of all time.