OpenAI bestowed its blessings and backing on another tech company Monday, inking a deal with chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, instantly making it one of the hot companies investors hope will be at the forefront of the artificial intelligence boom.
The shares of AMD soared more than 30% after the company behind ChatGPT said it plans to take up to a 10% stake in the chipmaker. This marks the latest example of Sam Altman’s multibillion-dollar deal-making frenzy that’s reshaping the American chip industry, where the upstart OpenAI seems to have the power to pick new winners, revive laggards and move public markets through its partnerships.
According to the multiyear deal, OpenAI will purchase AMD’s AI chips that will go into data center facilities that, in total, can draw six gigawatts of electrical power to run the chips. The first one-gigawatt deployment will begin with AMD Instinct MI450 GPUs in the second half of 2026.
“This partnership is a major step in building the compute capacity needed to realize AI’s full potential,” Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, said in a news release. “AMD’s leadership in high-performance chips will enable us to accelerate progress and bring the benefits of advanced AI to everyone faster.”
OpenAI received a warrant to purchase up to 160 million shares of AMD common stock, which is about 10% of the chipmaker. The stock acquisition won’t happen all at once and is designed as a multiyear commitment, in which OpenAI can buy shares of AMD at a low price of $0.01.
The stocks vest only on achieving specific milestones tied to AMD reaching certain share-price targets, and if OpenAI continues to buy and deploy AMD chips at a massive scale. The first stock tranche vests with the initial one-gigawatt deployment, with additional tranches vesting as purchases scale up to six gigawatts, the news release said.
The deal is expected to bring in tens of billions of dollars in revenue for AMD.
“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,” said Dr. Lisa Su, chair and chief executive of AMD, in a news release.
Globally, companies are expected to spend $375 billion on artificial intelligence infrastructure in 2025.
The race to build artificial general intelligence — a hypothetical AI system capable of performing all cognitive tasks performed by humans — has kicked off the need to build large-scale AI data centers that house specialized chips called graphics processing units.
Nvidia is the leading provider of such graphics chips and commands 70% of AI chip sales. However, as demand for various types of AI workloads increases, both startups and legacy rivals have sought to offer more affordable alternatives to Nvidia’s chips.
Altman has repeatedly talked about chip shortage and has sought to diversify OpenAI’s chip supply, signing a $10-billion deal with Broadcom earlier this month to design custom AI chips.
OpenAI is currently valued at $500 billion, with 700 million weakly active users.
Altman has been seeking to invest billions of dollars in computing resources to support OpenAI’s efforts to win the AI race. In January, alongside Japanese investor Softbank and database provider Oracle, OpenAI committed $100 billion to build AI infrastructure in the United States. As part of the “Stargate project,” the companies plan to invest $500 billion over the next four years.
OpenAI signed a deal in May to build out a one-gigawatt data center complex in the United Arab Emirates, a deal that was brokered by the Trump administration. Oracle, Nvidia, Softbank, Cisco and G42, a royals-backed Emirati AI company, are set to back the project.
