Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Says OpenAI Will Be the Next ‘Multi-Trillion-Dollar’ Company

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Key Points

• Nvidia plans to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI to develop 10 gigawatts of AI data center capacity.
• OpenAI’s ChatGPT now has over 700 million weekly active users, an increase from 300 million in December.
• Nvidia’s CEO believes OpenAI could become a multi-trillion-dollar hyperscale company, similar to Meta and Google.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is bullish on OpenAI’s prospects.

“I think that OpenAI is likely going to be the next multi-trillion-dollar hyperscale company,” he said on the BG2 podcast published Thursday. “Hyperscale like Meta is hyperscale. Google is hyperscale. They’re going to have consumer and enterprise services.”

Meta Platforms and Alphabet , the parent company of Google, have market values of $1.9 trillion and $3 trillion, respectively.

On Monday, ChatGPT parent OpenAI and Nvidia announced a new partnership where the leading maker of AI chips plans to invest as much as $100 billion in OpenAI to support the buildout of 10 gigawatts of AI data center capacity. For context, one nuclear reactor can typically generate one gigawatt of electricity. OpenAI said ChatGPT now has over 700 million weekly active users. That figure is up from 300 million in December.

Huang said if OpenAI is going to be that successful, the opportunity to invest in OpenAI will likely be one of the “smartest” investments to make now for Nvidia, noting the start-up is the “fastest-growing revenue company” in history.

“You ought to invest in things you know. It turns out we happen to know the space,” he said. “The return on that money is going to be fantastic. We love the opportunity to invest. We don’t have to invest.”

The Nvidia CEO also played down the probability of a AI computing “glut” within the next five years. “Until we fully convert all general purpose computing [CPUs] to accelerated computing [GPUs] and AI, until we do that, I think the chances are extremely low,” the executive said. “That will take a few years.”

Huang is referencing the computing platform shift from the legacy model that used CPUs to retrieve static files to an AI-based GPU computing system that is able to distill and generate knowledge intelligence from vast pools of data.

Write to Tae Kim at tae.kim@barrons.com