'No drama': Nvidia's Jensen Huang says OpenAI investment plan on track

The latest clarification came after reports suggested Nvidia had paused or slowed its $100 billion investment plans in OpenAI

Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said the company's planned investment in artificial intelligence (AI) firm OpenAI is moving ahead as expected amid reports of tensions between the two companies.

 

In an interview with CNBC on Tuesday, Huang said, "There's no drama involved. Everything's on track." 

 

"There's no controversy at all. It's complete nonsense... We love working with OpenAI," he added.

What reports said about Nvidia's OpenAI investment

The clarification came after reports suggested Nvidia had paused or slowed its $100 billion investment plans in OpenAI.

 

Both sides were said to be rethinking the structure of the partnership, The Wall Street Journal reported. Nvidia was even exploring investing a smaller amount, running into tens of billions of dollars, as part of OpenAI’s current fundraising round.  ALSO READ | Musk's xAI merger with SpaceX poses bigger threat to OpenAI, Anthropic

 

Details of the proposed $100 billion deal

Nvidia and OpenAI announced the proposed partnership in September last year. At the time, they said they had signed a letter of intent for a strategic deal.

 

The proposed investment of up to $100 billion was meant to fund new data centres and AI infrastructure using Nvidia chips. The plan aimed to build around 10 gigawatts of computing capacity, which is roughly equal to the peak power demand of New York City, Bloomberg reported.

OpenAI’s fundraising plans

OpenAI is seeking to raise as much as $100 billion in its current funding round. Amazon is in talks to invest up to $50 billion and expand an existing agreement to provide computing power to the AI startup, Bloomberg reported.

 

According to Reuters, OpenAI has been unhappy with some of Nvidia’s latest AI chips, especially for certain inference tasks, where AI models generate responses to users.

 

While Nvidia continues to dominate chips used to train large AI models, inference has emerged as a new area of competition. OpenAI has been exploring alternative chips since last year, which has added complexity to talks with Nvidia, Reuters reported.