OpenAI wants to buy millions of AMD accelerators
An agreement with OpenAI flushes countless billions of US dollars into AMD's coffers. The stock market reacts ecstatically.
AMD's current MI300 series (rendering).
(Image: AMD)
AMD has landed its largest AI accelerator sales deal to date: OpenAI wants to buy AMD GPUs with a total capacity of six gigawatts over the next five years. It will start in the second half of 2026 with a tranche of AMD's next generation of accelerators, the Instinct MI450, which is expected to account for a total of one gigawatt.
According to today's standards, six gigawatts would correspond to almost 4.3 million Instinct MI355X GPUs, which have a thermal design power (TDP) of 1400 watts. The electrical power consumption per accelerator is set to increase further by 2030: at 2000 watts, it would be three million GPUs, at 3000 watts, two million.
Either way, the agreement is huge for AMD. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, AMD CEO Lisa Su says that every gigawatt of capacity costs tens of billions of US dollars. AMD's data center division is likely to grow enormously as a result; its most recent quarterly turnover was 3.2 billion dollars.
OpenAI backs AMD and Nvidia at the same time
OpenAI is taking a two-pronged approach with the purchase of AMD accelerators for its data centers: the company wants to use the GPUs for so-called AI inference, i.e., for the execution of fully trained AI algorithms. If a user asks ChatGPT a question, for example, AMD hardware could take care of the answer in the future.
Meanwhile, electrical power consumption appears to be the most important parameter for computing capacity. It was only in September that OpenAI announced a cooperation with Nvidia totaling ten gigawatts. OpenAI's AI models are trained on Nvidia's AI accelerators.
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OpenAI acquires a stake in AMD
To lend weight to the purchase intentions, AMD and OpenAI are linking several milestones to a stake in the company: If the milestones are reached, OpenAI will receive the option to buy a total of 160 million AMD ordinary shares for one symbolic cent each. This would currently correspond to an AMD stake of around ten percent.
The milestones contain two components: first, OpenAI must actually purchase the Instinct accelerators, and second, AMD's stock must reach defined (but not publicly disclosed) targets. The first tranche of AMD shares is to go to OpenAI with the provision of the Instinct MI450 accelerators.
AMD's share price has shot up by over 30 percent since the announcement and is close to its all-time high of March 2024. Nvidia's share price has only fallen slightly.
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