OpenAI agrees to buy 'tens of billions' worth of AMD chips (www.engadget.com)

OpenAI has struck a major multi-year compute deal with AMD to deploy six gigawatts of AI infrastructure using AMD Instinct GPUs, with the first gigawatt of MI450 accelerators slated for deployment in the second half of 2026. AMD expects "tens of billions" in revenue from the agreement, and OpenAI gets the option to buy 160 million AMD shares at $0.01 apiece that vest against deployment milestones — potentially giving OpenAI up to a 10% stake in AMD. AMD will act as a "core strategic compute partner" for large-scale OpenAI deployments, complementing OpenAI’s separate, previously announced NVIDIA arrangement (at least 10 GW) and ongoing collaborations with Microsoft. For the AI/ML community, the deal signals a rapid scaling and diversification of accelerator supply that will shape model training and inference economics, performance, and infrastructure design. Committing gigawatts of Instinct MI450 capacity implies huge increases in cluster parallelism, power draw, cooling and datacenter engineering, and could lower vendor lock‑in by enabling multi-vendor stacks. The equity component aligns long-term incentives between OpenAI and AMD, potentially accelerating custom hardware optimizations. Combined with parallel investments across NVIDIA, Intel and Microsoft, this competition among chipmakers should drive faster hardware innovation and broader access to large-scale compute — but also raises operational, software interoperability, and energy-efficiency challenges for organizations building next‑generation AI systems.