OpenAI has struck a multi-year deal with NVIDIA's competitor—Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)—to purchase an estimated tens of billions of dollars’ worth of AI chips. Just a few weeks back, NVIDIA announced plans to invest $100 billion into OpenAI. Now, the AI company has pledged another agreement with AMD.
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)—founded in 1969 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California—is an American semiconductor company that designs and produces computer processors, graphics cards, and related technologies. The company is one of the leading players in the global chip industry best known for developing: CPUs and GPUs.
AMD has gained its ground against competitors like Intel and NVIDIA in recent years. The company could meet up with these biggest players in area like producing high-performance computing and artificial intelligence chips. The company’s chips are used in cloud data centers, gaming consoles (including the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X), and AI infrastructure.
Meanwhile, it's important to note that OpenAI is not only partnering with two separate companies that are competitors. The AI company has also strengthened its partnerships in the tech world even with Microsoft—the company that runs Copilot AI. Notably, Microsoft has invested over $13 billion in OpenAI.
The Microsoft's investment in the AI company earns it a 49% share of OpenAI’s profits. In addition to that, both Microsoft and OpenAI are exploring new ways to integrate and share their technologies—particularly in cloud computing and AI development. In essence, OpenAI is only finding all the possible ways to remain the leader in this AI era.
OpenAI Bets Big on AMD to Fuel Its Future
The partnership between OpenAI and AMD covers up to six gigawatts of AMD’s next-generation graphics processors, with the first wave—powered by AMD’s upcoming Instinct MI450 series—set to roll out in the second half of 2026.
OpenAI stated that AMD will serve "as a core strategic compute partner to drive large-scale deployments," helping to expand and manage large-scale deployments of its computing technology. The company plans to utilize AMD’s Instinct series GPUs, beginning with the rollout of one gigawatt of Instinct MI450 chips in the latter half of 2026.
AMD’s leadership in high-performance chips will enable us to accelerate progress and bring the benefits of advanced AI to everyone faster."
Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, said in a statement.
According to AMD’s official announcement, the agreement isn’t just a massive supply contract—it also includes a warrant allowing OpenAI to acquire up to 160 million AMD shares, that's about 10% of the company’s total stock, if specific deployment and stock-price milestones are met.
The collaboration is a strategic shift for OpenAI, which has relied heavily on Nvidia’s GPUs to train and run its advanced AI models. By bringing AMD into the mix, OpenAI aims to diversify its chip supply and ensure a more stable and scalable computing infrastructure for the next generation of AI systems.
After the news broke, AMD’s stock soared to more than 20% in early trading as investors celebrated what’s likely to be one of the largest chip deals in history. Industry watchers see the partnership as a sign that AMD is emerging as a serious rival to Nvidia in the AI hardware race.
However, it's worth noting that the AI hardware sector has seen explosive demand due to the rapid growth of generative AI. Due to this, AI investors are sealing agreements almost everywhere. Notably, NVIDIA has formed a major alliance with Intel, investing $5 billion to better combine their respective strengths.
The goal is to connect NVIDIA’s expertise in AI and accelerated computing with Intel’s leading CPU technology and vast x86 ecosystem. As part of this collaboration, Intel will design custom x86 CPUs specifically for NVIDIA, supporting advanced AI systems and data center platforms that require massive computing power.
Another notable one is when OpenAI plans to collaborate with NVIDIA to build massive AI data centers totaling around 10 gigawatts of computing power. The ambitious $100 billion investment will be rolled out in phases, with each stage aligned to the activation of a new gigawatt of capacity.
This large-scale project is expected to begin in the latter half of 2026 under the Vera Rubin platform.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described the OpenAI-AMD partnership as an important move towards expanding global AI capacity, while AMD CEO Lisa Su called it a “win-win” that pairs AMD’s technical leadership with OpenAI’s vision for large-scale AI deployment.
If successful, this deal could redefine how the world’s leading AI company sources its computing power—and how competition in the semiconductor industry evolves in the age of artificial intelligence.
