Nvidia CFO predicts frontier AI labs like OpenAI will become the largest tech companies in history

Nvidia’s chief financial officer Colette Kress has made a bold prediction about the future of the technology industry: frontier AI labs, the companies building the most advanced AI models, will become the largest tech companies in history.

Coming from the CFO of a company that is simultaneously the primary GPU supplier to those labs and an active investor in their infrastructure, the statement is equal parts forecast and sales pitch. But the numbers backing it up are hard to ignore.

The scale of what Nvidia is describing

Kress framed frontier AI labs as “proven companies with rapidly growing customer use,” a characterization that carries weight when you look at the financial commitments flowing through Nvidia’s books.

Nvidia currently has $500 billion in bookings for its Blackwell and Rubin chip architectures through 2026. The striking part: those bookings don’t include any OpenAI-related collaborations. OpenAI’s business with Nvidia sits entirely on top of that half-trillion-dollar pile.

CEO Jensen Huang put some scale on what OpenAI alone could mean. He estimated that OpenAI’s existing and future deployments could represent around 12 gigawatts of computing demand, with potential expansion to 16 gigawatts. Translated into dollar terms, that’s roughly $600 billion worth of Nvidia compute resources by 2030.

Following the money into Ohio

Nvidia isn’t just selling chips to OpenAI. It’s actively financing the physical infrastructure OpenAI needs to use those chips.

The company is investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy to support OpenAI’s 20-year lease of the PORTS-Pike data center campus in Ohio. That facility has an initial capacity of 4.25 gigawatts, making it one of the largest data center projects in the world.

Nvidia is also providing credit support and negotiating a broader investment framework with OpenAI worth up to $100 billion. As of late 2025, that framework hadn’t been finalized, but the sheer size of the discussions signals how deeply intertwined these companies are becoming.

The $3-4 trillion thesis

Kress projected that global AI infrastructure investment will reach $3 to $4 trillion by the end of the decade. That figure encompasses spending from hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon alongside the frontier AI labs themselves.

Nvidia’s recent financial results suggest the company is already capturing a massive share of that spending. In Q2 of its fiscal year 2027, Nvidia posted $96.2 billion in revenue, a 106% increase year-over-year. Of that total, $89 billion came from its Data Center segment alone.

That revenue mix tells a clear story. Nvidia has transformed from a company known for gaming graphics cards into one that derives the vast majority of its income from powering AI workloads. The Data Center segment now accounts for more than 92% of total revenue.

What this means for the competitive landscape

Kress’s prediction about frontier AI labs becoming the largest tech companies in history implicitly raises a question about the current giants. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet have traded the title of most valuable public company for years. The suggestion that OpenAI and its peers could surpass them represents a potential reshuffling of the entire technology hierarchy.

The math, at least on Nvidia’s projections, makes it plausible. If a single AI lab generates $600 billion in compute demand from one supplier alone, the total economic footprint of that lab, including revenue from its own products and services, could be enormous.

There’s an obvious tension in this narrative, though. Nvidia benefits directly from talking up the growth prospects of its biggest customers. Every dollar that investors pour into frontier AI labs eventually flows back to Nvidia in the form of chip orders.

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