Nvidia’s chief financial officer, Colette Kress, has made a striking 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.

For a company that is both the leading GPU supplier to those labs and an active investor in the infrastructure they need, the remark reads as both a forecast and a commercial argument. Still, the figures supporting it are substantial, and they help explain why the scale of AI spending is now becoming a central issue across the broader tech sector.

The scale of Nvidia’s view of the market

Kress described frontier AI labs as “proven companies with rapidly growing customer use,” a framing that takes on added weight when measured against the financial commitments moving through Nvidia’s business.

Nvidia currently has $500 billion in bookings for its Blackwell and Rubin chip architectures through 2026. Notably, those bookings do not include any OpenAI-related collaborations. OpenAI’s business with Nvidia sits on top of that half-trillion-dollar total.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has also outlined the scale of OpenAI’s potential demand. He said OpenAI’s current and future deployments could require about 12 gigawatts of computing capacity, with the possibility of expanding to 16 gigawatts. In dollar terms, that would amount to roughly $600 billion worth of Nvidia compute resources by 2030.

Nvidia’s financing role in Ohio

Nvidia is not only selling chips to OpenAI. It is also helping finance the physical infrastructure needed to run them.

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. The site 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 is negotiating a broader investment framework with OpenAI worth up to $100 billion. As of late 2025, that framework had not been finalized, but the size of the talks shows how closely the companies are becoming intertwined.

The $3 trillion to $4 trillion infrastructure thesis

Kress said global AI infrastructure investment is expected to reach $3 trillion to $4 trillion by the end of the decade. That spending would include hyperscalers such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, as well as frontier AI labs themselves.

Nvidia’s latest results suggest the company is already capturing a huge share of that investment. In the second quarter of its fiscal year 2027, Nvidia reported $96.2 billion in revenue, up 106% year over year. Of that total, $89 billion came from its Data Center segment.

The revenue breakdown underscores how Nvidia has changed. Once best known for gaming graphics cards, the company now gets the vast majority of its income from AI workloads. The Data Center segment now accounts for more than 92% of total revenue, showing how closely Nvidia’s growth is tied to the same buildout it is describing.

Implications for the technology hierarchy

Kress’s view that frontier AI labs could become the largest tech companies in history raises a broader question about the current industry leaders. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet have long traded positions as the most valuable public companies. The suggestion that OpenAI and its peers could surpass them points to a possible reshaping of the entire technology hierarchy.

Based on Nvidia’s projections, the numbers make that scenario plausible. If one AI lab alone generates $600 billion in compute demand from a single supplier, its wider economic footprint, including revenue from its own products and services, could be enormous.

At the same time, there is an obvious tension in the narrative. Nvidia stands to benefit directly from emphasizing the growth of its largest customers. Every dollar invested into frontier AI labs can eventually translate into chip orders for Nvidia, which helps explain why infrastructure spending, financing arrangements, and model development are increasingly being discussed as part of the same story.