The deal will see OpenAI buying millions of Nvidia processors from late next year, which could net the GPU peddler hundreds of billions in sales, though no timeframe has been nailed down. The two sides have only agreed to a letter of intent so far.

OpenAI will stump up cash for the chips, while Nvidia will grab a non-controlling slice of the company. The first $10 billion of that investment will trigger once the outfits sign a definitive agreement.

OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT, is now being whispered about with a valuation of $500 billion. The company claims 700 million weekly users and chews through obscene amounts of compute to train its large language models. Nvidia, currently the world’s most valuable firm with a market cap beyond $4.4 trillion, is happily flogging the shovels for the ongoing AI gold rush.

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said: “everything starts with compute and compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future and we will utilise what we’re building with Nvidia to both create new AI breakthroughs.”

Nvidia shares perked up by 3.9 per cent in New York trading after the announcement.

The companies reckon the deal will let OpenAI “build and deploy” a flood of new AI data centres.

Writing in its bog, OpenAI bragged that “this partnership complements the deep work OpenAI and Nvidia are already doing with a broad network of collaborators, including Microsoft, Oracle, SoftBank, and Stargate partners, focused on building the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure.”

Last week Nvidia also announced a $5 billion tie-up with troubled Intel to co-develop AI chips, while Microsoft continues to bankroll OpenAI’s rise.