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- OpenAI announced a deal with AMD for 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs.OpenAI President Greg Brockman said the company has a voracious appetite for more computing power.Just last month, OpenAI announced a big deal with Nvidia.
OpenAI's blockbuster deal with AMD is all about compute.
"We need as much computing power as we can possibly get, and I think the whole industry right now is trying to really adapt to the amount of demand for AI services that we see coming over the next couple of years," OpenAI President Greg Brockman said Monday on CNBC following the announcement.
Brockman has previously talked about his desire to guarantee every user gets their own GPU, which would require a massive expansion of OpenAI's capacity.
"What we're really seeing is a world where there's going to be absolute compute scarcity, because there's going to be so much demand for AI services and not just from OpenAI, really from the whole ecosystem," he said. "And so that's why it's just so important for this whole industry to come together and say, how can we build in advance of this compute desert that we're heading towards otherwise."
On Monday, AMD and OpenAI announced an agreement to deploy 6 gigawatts of GPUs. The first gigawatt, which will use AMD's Instinct MI450, is expected to begin in the second half of 2026, the companies said.
The announcement comes after OpenAI's C-suite spent weeks earlier this summer expressing a desire for more computing power. CFO Sarah Friar said "constantly being under compute" was the biggest issue.
"This partnership is a major step in building the compute capacity needed to realize AI's full potential," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement. "AMD's leadership in high-performance chips will enable us to accelerate progress and bring the benefits of advanced AI to everyone faster."
From Brockman's perspective, the need to rapidly expand compute is why OpenAI is working with AMD while also expanding its partnership with Nvidia. Last month, Nvidia said it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI.
"I think that Nvidia has something very special," Brockman said. "We use them for training, we use them for inference. AMD, I think, also is really delivering in terms of the next generation of chip that they've been working on. "
As part of the deal, AMD issued OpenAI a warrant for up to 160 million shares of the chipmaker's common stock if specific benchmarks are met. AMD CEO Lisa Su said that the share warrant was designed to ensure a long-term partnership.
"The idea is that as OpenAI deploys compute, that's a huge benefit to AMD in terms of the number, the amount of revenue that we get from that," Su said during the joint interview with Brockman. "Every gigawatt of compute is significant, double-digit billions of revenue to us."
Shares of AMD shot up massively upon Monday's opening, at one point soaring up more than 38%.
