Nvidia backs OpenAI financing（Contemporary computing-campus planning concept illustration）

2 months agoAI Agents

2026-08-17

Nvidia backs OpenAI financing

Up to $105 billion supports the first 4.25 gigawatts of compute at the Ohio campus, coming online from 2028.

Art style · Contemporary computing-campus planning concept illustration

World population

8.34Bpeople

Primary energy power

2×10¹³W

London → New York message

0.03 seconds

Civilization metrics

Each sparkline shows the documented history of a metric on a logarithmic time axis. The dot marks the selected moment.

Kardashev index

0.731

Based on primary energy power · Type I = 1

World populationEstimate

8.34Bpeople

Comparable to today

Total human primary energy power

2×10¹³W

Comparable to today

Compute per dollar

8.1×10¹⁰floating-point operations per second per dollar (FLOP/s per $, nominal dollars)

Comparable to today

Fastest delivery time for a message from London to New York

0.03 seconds

Comparable to today

Fastest speed reached by humans

39,897km/h

Comparable to today

Near this moment

The eight closest milestones. Select a title to jump there.

2026-07-21Intelligence
Google releases three Flash models and says pretraining of Gemini 4 has begun. Source
2026-08-01Intelligence
A new OpenAI model solves ten problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science that had stood open for more than a decade. Source
2026-08-03Intelligence
Alibaba releases a 2.4-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 95 billion active parameters and pledges to open its weights. Source
2026-08-10Intelligence
A cybersecurity-specific model offered only to vetted partners. Source
2026-08-12Intelligence
Ties GPT-5.6 Sol on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Source
2026-08-17Intelligence
Up to $105 billion supports the first 4.25 gigawatts of compute at the Ohio campus, coming online from 2028. Source
2026-09-01Intelligence
Base pricing is unchanged; cache-read prices drop by 75%. Source
2026-09-03Intelligence
OpenAI rolls out GPT-6 Astra in stages, with cybersecurity program participants first. Source

Capabilities

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10 scenes · Select a scene to visit that moment

AI begins operating computers autonomously, programming for hours on end and solving hard math problems, while frontier models iterate week by week.

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Every timeline entry cites its source. Metrics interpolate logarithmically between sourced data points. Forecasts include institutional and community views, and attributed site scenarios; years are not guaranteed realization dates. Illustrations are AI-generated in each era's style.

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