OpenAI has signed a multibillion-dollar deal with AMD to purchase up to 6 gigawatts¹ of chips, including the MI450, to power AI inference workloads starting in 2026. The agreement includes warrants for OpenAI to acquire up to 10% of AMD at a nominal cost, contingent on performance milestones. This is AMD’s most direct challenge to Nvidia’s dominance and signals a shift in AI chip procurement strategy.
Here are four quick points:
- Vendor Financing in Equity Form
AMD is effectively subsidizing demand by issuing OpenAI warrants for up to 160M shares. That makes OpenAI a 10% shareholder: part customer, part financier — a risk transfer from cash to stock, as well as making OpenAI the largest and thus controlling AMD shareholder.
- CUDA Lock-in Challenge
Embedding OpenAI as a large AMD partner forces ROCm (AMD's stack) adoption at scale. This is less about FLOPS and more about dragging AI software development out of CUDA’s orbit, with large implications as workloads shift to inference from training.
- Data Center Overbuild Risk Grows