OpenAI commits to purchasing $10B+ of AMD hardware and stock in multi-year strategic partnership.
OpenAI will buy tens of billions of dollars' worth of data center hardware from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. as part of a partnership announced today. The collaboration will see OpenAI deploy 6 gigawatts' worth of AMD graphics processing units to power its workloads, beginning with a one gigawatt deployment of the chipmaker's upcoming Instinct MI450 GPU series. Work on that initial cluster will begin in the second half of 2026. OpenAI and AMD describe their partnership as a "multi-year, multi-generation agreement," hinting that the ChatGPT developer plans to purchase not only the MI450 but also subsequent generations of chips. As AMD Chief Financial Officer Jean Hu stated, "Our partnership with OpenAI is expected to deliver tens of billions of dollars in revenue for AMD while accelerating OpenAI's AI infrastructure buildout."
The MI450 is the planned successor to the MI355X, AMD's flagship data center AI accelerator. The MI355X is a liquid-cooled GPU that includes 10 chiplets, three different types of AI cores and 288 gigabytes of HBM3E memory, and can provide more than 10 petaflops of performance when processing FP4 numbers. The upcoming MI450 is believed to have a more specialized design optimized solely for AI infrastructure, lacking support for certain data formats commonly used in supercomputers but not as popular among language model developers. It will also support Ultra Accelerator Link, an open-source interconnect for linking together GPUs in AI clusters, with the current iteration of the standard supporting clusters with up to 1,024 AI accelerators. AMD spent $4.8 billion to acquire ZT Systems Inc., a developer of servers and rack-scale systems, and plans to ship the MI450 as part of rack-scale appliances that will each contain 128 GPUs, with those appliances expected to launch in the second half of 2026.
The partnership includes a stock warrant giving OpenAI the option to buy 160 million shares of AMD, representing approximately 10% stake, with the amount dependent on how well OpenAI fulfills the terms of the partnership. The first batch of shares is set to vest once OpenAI sets up its initial one gigawatt deployment, with the remaining stock becoming available gradually as additional data center capacity comes online. OpenAI must also meet "technical and commercial milestones required to enable AMD deployments at scale," and AMD's share price will have to top a certain unspecified threshold for full access to the shares.
This tie-up comes less than a month after Nvidia Corp. agreed to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as part of a similar partnership, under which the ChatGPT developer will deploy at least 10 gigawatts' worth of hardware powered by Vera Rubin, Nvidia's next flagship AI chip. Like AMD's MI450 series, that processor is expected to start shipping in the second half of 2026.