OpenAI and Nvidia’s $100B AI Plan Will Require Power Equal to 10 Nuclear Reactors

upstart writes:

"This is a giant project," Nvidia CEO said of new 10-gigawatt AI infrastructure deal:

On Monday, OpenAI and Nvidia jointly announced a letter of intent for a strategic partnership to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems for OpenAI's AI infrastructure, with Nvidia planning to invest up to $100 billion as the systems roll out. The companies said the first gigawatt of Nvidia systems will come online in the second half of 2026 using Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform.

"Everything starts with compute," said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, in the announcement. "Compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future, and we will utilize what we're building with NVIDIA to both create new AI breakthroughs and empower people and businesses with them at scale."

The 10-gigawatt project represents an astoundingly ambitious and as-yet-unproven scale for AI infrastructure. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC that the planned 10 gigawatts equals the power consumption of between 4 million and 5 million graphics processing units, which matches the company's total GPU shipments for this year and doubles last year's volume. "This is a giant project," Huang said in an interview alongside Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman.

To put that power demand in perspective, 10 gigawatts equals the output of roughly 10 nuclear reactors, which typically output about 1 gigawatt per facility. Current data center energy consumption ranges from 10 megawatts to 1 gigawatt, with most large facilities consuming between 50 and 100 megawatts. OpenAI's planned infrastructure would dwarf existing installations, requiring as much electricity as multiple major cities.

[...] Bryn Talkington, managing partner at Requisite Capital Management, noted the circular nature of the investment structure to CNBC. "Nvidia invests $100 billion in OpenAI, which then OpenAI turns back and gives it back to Nvidia," Talkington told CNBC. "I feel like this is going to be very virtuous for Jensen."

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