AMD and OpenAI Announce Strategic Partnership

AMD and OpenAI announced a strategic partnership in which the latter will deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs through 2030. The deal is worth “tens of billions of dollars” to AMD, and its announcement triggered a 20 percent jump in AMD’s stock price in premarket trading this morning. It then jumped almost 40 percent when the markets opened.

“We are thrilled to partner with OpenAI to deliver AI compute at massive scale,” AMD chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su said. “This partnership brings the best of AMD and OpenAI together to create a true win-win enabling the world’s most ambitious AI buildout and advancing the entire AI ecosystem.”

“This partnership is a major step in building the compute capacity needed to realize AI’s full potential,” OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman added. “AMD’s leadership in high-performance chips will enable us to accelerate progress and bring the benefits of advanced AI to everyone faster.”

The deal with AMD comes exactly two weeks after Nvidia announced that it was investing $100 billion in OpenAI with the aim of deploying at least 10 gigawatts of AI datacenters powered by Nvidia GPUs and OpenAI’s next-generation AI infrastructure. Nvidia’s high-flying stock price stuttered a bit Monday morning when the AMD/OpenAI deal was announced.

Under the terms of the AMD and OpenAI partnership, AMD is now a core strategic compute partner with OpenAI, which will deploy AMD Instinct MI450 Series GPUs starting in the second half of 2026. It will then move on to future generation AMD GPUs as the two expand their “multi-generational hardware and software collaboration.”

The biggest news here, perhaps, is that AMD has issued OpenAI a warrant for up to 160 million shares of AMD common stock, meaning that OpenAI has a right, but not an obligation, to purchase AMD stock at a predetermined price during a specific time frame. The stock will vest as specific milestones are achieved, AMD notes, with the first tranche (portion) vesting at the first one gigawatt deployment and tied to a share price of $600. Future tranches will vest as subsequent one gigawatt milestones occur, up to 6 gigawatts. It OpenAI purchases all the stock it can purchase, it will own about 10 percent of AMD.

The deal is a major win for AMD, which set its sights on Nvidia and bet its future on AI datacenter growth last year. But it’s struggled so far: In its most recent quarter, AMD’s Data Center business generated just $3.2 billion in revenues, compared to $41 billion in revenues for Nvidia’s Datacenter business in roughly the same period.

It’s unclear how OpenAI will finance this investment.