AMD CEO Lisa Su in Taipei on June 3, 2024.I-Hwa Cheng/AFP/Getty ImagesTalk about starting the week off with a bang.
The extraordinarily well-funded AI startup OpenAI has
announced a deal—pardon, a “six gigawatt agreement”—with Silicon Valley chipmaker AMD that would allow the younger company access to scores of GPUs and up to a 10% stake in the chipmaker.
AMD shares jumped 28% on the news, settling around $206.
Those 160 million AMD common shares won’t come all at once. They’re structured to vest according to “specific milestones,” including share price targets, the chipmaker says.
The first stock tranche comes with an initial 1-gigawatt deployment of AMD’s Instinct MI450 GPUs planned for the second half of 2026.
If you’re reading this and thinking that OpenAI is choosing against AI chip leader Nvidia by partnering with rival AMD, think again. It was just two weeks ago that
the company announced a 10-gigawatt deal with Nvidia, once again with an initial deployment scheduled for H2 2026.
Why all the dealmaking? The Stargate project with Microsoft, Oracle, and Softbank certainly plays a part. But if you ask me, it’s good old-fashioned Silicon Valley blitzscaling.
—AN