US tech giant Nvidia will invest up to $100bn (£73bn) in OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT, the companies have announced.

Nvidia said it will supply high-performance chips needed for the processing power required by artificial intelligence (AI), of which OpenAI is a specialist.

Described as a “strategic partnership” by Nvidia, it is the latest move by two high profile tech firms in the global AI race, where China is an emerging rival.

The announcement comes after a series of high-profile investments by Nvidia, including a $5bn investment in Intel and a £2bn investment in the UK’s AI sector.

Nvidia, which is the world’s most valuable company, said its latest investment will go towards data centres for OpenAI’s “next-generation AI infrastructure”.

Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, said the funding will mark the “next leap forward and power the next era of intelligence”.

Both firms said they were already working with a broad network of collaborators focused on making the “world’s most advanced AI infrastructure”, including working with Microsoft, Oracle, SoftBank, and Stargate.

However, the dominance of US AI firms has come under threat from China – particularly with the rise of DeepSeek-R1.

Meanwhile, Nvidia has come under pressure from both the Chinese and the US governments.

China said last week Nvidia had violated its anti-monopoly laws, but did not give details of how Nvidia had breached the rules.

China also reportedly ordered its top technology companies to halt purchases of the firm’s artificial intelligence (AI) chips. Huang told the BBC at the time he was “disappointed” with the news.

It came after Nvidia and its rival AMD agreed to pay the US government 15% of Chinese revenues to secure export licences to China to undo a US government ban on AI chip sales to the country.