NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang sent an internal email urging employees to use OpenAI’s Codex, with NVIDIA’s official blog stating that more than 10,000 employees across nine departments are already using the tool. The message drew wider attention after Sam Altman posted it on X.
Codex use extends well beyond engineering teams
NVIDIA said the rollout spans engineering, product, legal, marketing, finance, sales, human resources, operations, and developer programs. Publicly available details indicate Huang described AI agents as teammates for employees and said they can help people work “better, smarter, faster.” Aside from the closing line — “Let’s jump to lightspeed. Welcome to the age of AI.” — which NVIDIA published directly, the rest of the email content has mainly circulated through Altman’s screenshot and media reports.
The wording matters. NVIDIA described employees as “already using” Codex, while outside reports characterized Huang’s move with terms such as “encouraged” and “urging everyone to use,” pointing to broad internal adoption rather than a disclosed mandatory order.
GPT-5.5 is running on NVIDIA’s GB200 NVL72 systems
NVIDIA also tied the internal push to its own infrastructure story. The company said Codex is powered by GPT-5.5, and that model runs on NVIDIA’s GB200 NVL72 rack-scale systems. OpenAI officially released GPT-5.5 to paid subscribers on April 23, just six weeks after GPT-5.4.
That makes the email more than an internal software adoption note. It places OpenAI’s coding tool and NVIDIA’s hardware stack in the same commercial narrative, showing how closely the two companies’ products are now linked.
Closer ties come with visible strategic tension
The source material says NVIDIA had previously announced a $100 billion partnership with OpenAI to build a 10GW AI data center. Media reports have also described a proposed $30 billion investment that would make NVIDIA one of OpenAI’s major shareholders if completed.
At the same time, OpenAI is pushing ahead with its own AI chip project to reduce dependence on NVIDIA’s compute. AMD is also part of OpenAI’s hardware picture and has secured a 10% stake in the company. Against that backdrop, Huang’s email reads as a public show of alignment: NVIDIA is not only supplying infrastructure, it is also plugging its own workforce directly into OpenAI’s model ecosystem.
Huang closed the message with a line NVIDIA quoted in full: “Let’s jump to lightspeed. Welcome to the age of AI.”