OpenAI, AMD Announce Computing Deal, Marking New Phase of AI Boom (www.wsj.com)

OpenAI and AMD announced a multibillion-dollar partnership for AI data centers that will run on AMD processors, marking one of the clearest challenges yet to Nvidia’s dominance. Under the agreement OpenAI committed to purchasing the equivalent of 6 gigawatts of AMD chips beginning with the MI450 next year, buying them either directly or through cloud partners. AMD CEO Lisa Su said the deal will generate “tens of billions” in new revenue for the company over the next five years. Technically and strategically this is significant: 6 GW is a large-scale procurement that signals a major shift in accelerator sourcing for top-tier model training and inference, and could materially diversify supply away from a single vendor. For the AI/ML community the move could lower costs, increase capacity and resilience, and force broader competition on performance, power efficiency and pricing. It also implies accelerated work on software, toolchains and ecosystem support to run state-of-the-art models on AMD hardware (and for cloud providers to integrate MI450 at scale). In short, the deal reshapes procurement dynamics and could accelerate innovation and competition across chips, data-center design and AI infrastructure.