OpenAI Announces Another GPU "Strategic Partnership" (theahura.substack.com)

OpenAI and NVIDIA announced a letter of intent for a “strategic partnership” to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems to power OpenAI’s next-generation training and inference infrastructure, with the first phase slated for the second half of 2026 on NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin platform. NVIDIA also said it intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as those systems are deployed. The announcement follows (and references) Project Stargate — a previously touted multibillion-dollar datacenter initiative with SoftBank, Oracle and others that has shown little public progress — and the new deal is currently non‑finalized. Technically, 10 GW of compute implies massive scale-up in GPU capacity, datacenter space and power provisioning and would materially change OpenAI’s cost structure and model training throughput if realized. But analysts view the timing and publicity as a signal as much as substance: big compute press releases can indicate resource scarcity or an attempt to reassure investors rather than an immediate capability boost. If completed, the deal would deepen OpenAI’s dependence on NVIDIA hardware (and on large, centralized datacenters), raise questions about vendor concentration and power/real‑estate constraints, and contrast with firms like Anthropic that lean on cloud partners rather than owning GPU fleets.