OpenAI's Blockbuster AMD Deal Is a Bet on Near-Limitless Demand for AI (www.wired.com)

OpenAI struck a blockbuster multi-year deal with AMD to buy the equivalent of 6 gigawatts’ worth of AMD chips, with the first deployment of a gigawatt of Instinct MI450 GPUs slated for H2 2026. The agreement also gives OpenAI the right to acquire up to 160 million AMD shares (roughly a 10% stake) as it brings those chips online. Sam Altman said OpenAI will continue heavy investment in Nvidia GPUs as well, underscoring a multi-vendor strategy rather than an exclusive pivot. Technically and strategically, the deal signals OpenAI’s bet that demand for training and inference compute will keep accelerating—especially as models shift toward reasoning, long-contexts, and greater memory/CPU requirements. For AMD, landing a marquee customer like OpenAI is a major credibility win and could help it close the gap with Nvidia in the AI training/inference market. For the broader industry, the pact reinforces the “scale is everything” thesis behind the current data-center buildout, even as analysts warn of a potential mismatch between massive infrastructure investment (hundreds of billions) and current consumer AI revenue. The move highlights supply-chain, power, and efficiency realities that will shape future model design and datacenter architecture.