(Reuters) -Chipmaker Nvidia plans to invest up to $100 billion in artificial intelligence startup OpenAI under a new agreement, the companies said on Monday, as competition intensifies among technology giants to secure access to energy and chips needed for AI growth.

The companies unveiled a letter of intent for a landmark strategic partnership to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia chips for OpenAI’s AI infrastructure.

They aim to finalize partnership details in the coming weeks, with the first deployment phase targeted to come online in the second half of 2026

“Everything starts with compute,” Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI said in a release.

“Compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future, and we will utilize what we’re building with Nvidia to both create new AI breakthroughs and empower people and businesses with them at scale.”

Shares of Oracle , a partner with OpenAI, SoftBank , and Microsoft on the $500 billion Stargate AI data center project, gained nearly 5%.

Nvidia’s investment comes days after it committed $5 billion to struggling chipmaker Intel.

(Reporting by Arsheeya Bajwa in Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid)