OpenAI has signed a deal with chipmaker AMD to obtain six gigawatts’ worth of the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) chips, just weeks after unveiling a similar agreement with Nvidia.
The ChatGPT maker will have the option to take up to 160 million shares, or a stake of about 10 percent, in AMD as part of the agreement announced Monday.
“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,” AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su said in a statement.
The first gigawatt of AMD chips, its Instinct MI450 graphics processing units (GPUs), are set to be deployed in the second half of 2026, according to a press release.
OpenAI will receive its first tranche of shares once this initial step is completed. Additional shares will become available to the AI company as it continues to purchase AMD chips, while more shares are tied to AMD’s share price and other milestones.
“This partnership is a major step in building the compute capacity needed to realize AI’s full potential,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement. “AMD’s leadership in high-performance chips will enable us to accelerate progress and bring the benefits of advanced AI to everyone faster.”
Just two weeks earlier, OpenAI announced a partnership with Nvidia to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of its systems, equivalent to about 4 million to 5 million chips, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC. The chipmaker, in turn, is investing $100 billion in OpenAI.
The series of deals comes as AI companies search out vast amounts of additional computing power in order to develop, train and use their models. OpenAI executives said last month that they see a need for at least 20 gigawatts of computing power to meet demand, The Wall Street Journal reported.
