Nvidia Pours $1.5B Into SoftBank's Data Center Arm to Lock In OpenAI Chip Deal
Nvidia is putting $1.5 billion into a SoftBank-backed data center developer that's constructing facilities tied to OpenAI's compute needs. The deal effectively guarantees that Nvidia GPUs will be the hardware powering at least one major OpenAI data center build-out, rather than leaving room for a competitor's chips to win the slot.
This is part of a broader pattern of chipmakers and cloud players cross-investing in each other's infrastructure to secure long-term demand and supply certainty, as the AI boom strains global data center capacity and power availability.
SoftBank has been aggressively expanding its footprint in AI infrastructure, and this partnership adds another thread connecting it, Nvidia, and OpenAI into a tightly interlocked supply chain.