The AI arms race turned a new page on Monday, as OpenAI and chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced that the two have agreed to a new partnership to create new data centers powered by AMD’s chips. The deal could also see OpenAI take a roughly 10% stake in AMD.
Specifically, the partnership sees OpenAI committing to buying 6 gigawatts of AMD GPU chips, with the initial gigawatt deployment scheduled for the second half of 2026. The deal will ultimately see OpenAI deploy the remaining gigawatts over multiple years and multiple hardware generations.
The deal also sees AMD issuing a warrant for as many as 160 million shares of AMD stock to OpenAI. Those shares are structured to vest in the event that “specific milestones are achieved,” the company said.
The deal was a hit on Wall Street, as AMD shares hit the stratosphere—at the market open on Monday, shares briefly topped $220.44, an increase of more than 34% from pre-trading. As of roughly 11 am ET, however, shares had fallen slightly but were still up more than 27%.
“This partnership is a major step in building the compute capacity needed to realize AI’s full potential,” said Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, in a company release. “AMD’s leadership in high-performance chips will enable us to accelerate progress and bring the benefits of advanced AI to everyone faster.”
AMD’s leadership echoed the sentiment.
“We are thrilled to partner with OpenAI to deliver AI computers at a massive scale,” said Dr. Lisa Su, chair and CEO of AMD, in a corresponding release. “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.”
The partnership’s announcement arrives as the AI arms race continues to heat up. AMD finds itself playing catch-up with Nvidia, which has taken a dominant role in the space, particularly as it comes to developing, manufacturing, and deploying AI chips. But there is a clear hunger in the market for more computing power. As such, Nvidia and AMD could feel pressure from other burgeoning players, such as Google and Amazon, who are working on AI chips of their own. OpenAI also partnered with Broadcom to build in-house chips starting next year.
Notably, OpenAI also recently announced a deal with Nvidia, which called for Nvidia to invest as much as $100 billion in OpenAI—but that deal has not yet been completed.
