On October 6, 2025 AMD and OpenAI announced a strategic partnership under which OpenAI would deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs across multiple chip generations in a multi-year agreement. The first 1 gigawatt of AMD Instinct MI450 Series GPUs is set to come online in the second half of 2026, with OpenAI working with AMD as a core strategic compute partner.
As part of the deal, AMD issued OpenAI a warrant for up to 160 million shares of AMD common stock. The release stated that “the first tranche vests with the initial 1 gigawatt deployment, with additional tranches vesting as purchases scale up to 6 gigawatts,” and that vesting is tied both to AMD share-price targets and to OpenAI hitting technical and commercial milestones. AMD’s chief financial officer said the partnership was expected to deliver “tens of billions of dollars in revenue for AMD.”
The arrangement is notable for binding a customer’s purchasing to equity in the supplier: by giving OpenAI a path to roughly a 10 percent stake, AMD aligned the chipmaker’s stock upside with OpenAI’s deployment of its hardware - an alternative to OpenAI’s heavy reliance on NVIDIA.
Why business readers should care: this deal shows the financial engineering now wrapped around AI compute - long-term, multi-gigawatt commitments paired with equity warrants that make a major customer also a major shareholder. It signaled a serious second source of frontier-scale GPUs alongside NVIDIA.