OpenAI just gave AMD a big boost in the AI chip wars (www.businessinsider.com)

OpenAI announced a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar agreement to deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD AI GPUs, with the first 1 GW scheduled to come online in the second half of 2026. The deal includes an option for OpenAI to take roughly a 10% stake in AMD, with shares vesting as deployment and AMD share-price targets are met. OpenAI called the partnership “a major step in building the compute capacity needed to realize AI’s full potential,” and AMD’s stock jumped about 27% in premarket trading after the news. The deal is significant because it gives AMD a major foothold against Nvidia, the current dominant supplier of AI accelerators, and signals stronger supplier diversification for large-scale model training and inference. Deploying gigawatts of GPU power implies massive datacenter builds, long-term power and cooling commitments, and the ability to scale larger models or serve more inference traffic. The vesting-linked equity stake aligns incentives across procurement, deployment milestones, and market performance, while potentially shifting competitive dynamics in pricing, supply stability, and hardware choice across the AI ecosystem. This is a developing story with broad implications for chip vendors, cloud providers, and the economics of training ever-larger models.