AMD wins massive AI chip deal from OpenAI with stock sweetener (arstechnica.com)

AMD announced a multi-year agreement to supply OpenAI with hundreds of thousands of AI GPUs beginning in the second half of 2026, in a deal Reuters says is worth “tens of billions” annually. As part of the pact OpenAI gets an option to acquire up to 10% of AMD’s stock for one cent per share. AMD says the relationship will drive more than $100 billion in new revenue over four years from OpenAI and prospective customers that follow its lead, and it will start recognizing income next year when OpenAI begins building a 1-gigawatt facility based on AMD’s forthcoming MI450-series AI accelerators. For the AI/ML community this is a major endorsement of AMD’s hardware and software stack and a notable rival to Nvidia’s dominance in training and inference accelerators. The scale — hundreds of thousands of GPUs and a 1 GW data-center power commitment — signals big, long-term capacity investments by a leading model developer, which could diversify cloud and on-prem AI compute supply, influence pricing, and spur ecosystem support (drivers, libraries, optimized frameworks) for AMD’s MI450 architecture. The highly favorable equity option also aligns financial incentives between supplier and customer and underscores how strategic hardware partnerships are reshaping competition and procurement for large-scale model training.