Apple and Nvidia are in negotiations to invest in the AI startup OpenAI to deepen their strategic partnerships in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). These investments are expected to be part of a new funding round for OpenAI, which would value the company behind the well-known chatbot ChatGPT at over $100 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

This funding round is expected to be led by the venture capital firm Thrive Capital and is projected to amount to several billion dollars. Microsoft, which has already invested around 13 billion dollars in OpenAI since 2019 and holds 49 percent of the company's profits, will also participate in the round. The exact investment amounts from Apple, Nvidia, or Microsoft have not been disclosed.

Nvidia, the world’s leading manufacturer of chips that power ChatGPT and other AI models, has long been working closely with OpenAI. The investment would help Nvidia further expand its dominant role in the AI sector.

Apple announced OpenAI as the first official partner for its "Apple Intelligence" system in June, which integrates AI features throughout the entire operating system. Some of these new AI functionalities, such as the improved voice assistant Siri and the creation of custom emojis, are powered by Apple's own AI technology. However, for more complex tasks, such as generating texts, Apple relies on OpenAI's ChatGPT.

The Planned Investment by Apple in OpenAI Underscores the Company's Endeavor to Ensure Access to Leading AI Technologies. While Apple has so far acted as a neutral partner in the AI field, this investment could complicate collaboration with other AI companies such as Google, Meta, and startups like Anthropic and Perplexity.

For Apple, such an investment in a startup would be unusual, as the company has primarily invested in manufacturing partners in the past to secure the supply of key components for its devices. Apple pursued a similar strategy in 2017 when it invested one billion dollars in SoftBank's Vision Fund to accelerate the development of strategically important technologies.

Nvidia has also increased its investment activity over the past two years, channeling capital into emerging AI companies such as Inflection AI and Databricks, as well as into smaller startups in the fields of AI-driven drug discovery and robotics.

OpenAI is one of the biggest users of Nvidia's AI chips and has used tens of thousands of them to train its most advanced AI systems. The upcoming investment could further strengthen the close relationship between the two companies.