AMD Stock Skyrockets After Announcing ‘Major’ 6-Gigawatt OpenAI GPU Deal

In discussing AMD’s new ‘multi-year, multi-generation’ partnership with OpenAI, CEO Lisa Su says the deal represents a ‘major inflection point for us’ and will generate ‘tens of billions of dollars’ over the coming years in its challenge to Nvidia’s AI computing dominance.

AMD’s stock price increased by more than 30 percent in pre-market trading Monday after the company announced this morning a “multi-year, multi-generation” partnership with OpenAI that will see the ChatGPT maker deploy 6 gigawatts of Instinct GPUs.

AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su called the deal “a major inflection point for us” in a Monday morning webcast and said it will generate “tens of billions of dollars over the next number of years” as the Instinct GPU deployment begins in late 2026 and expands from there.

“This unique structure tightly aligns OpenAI and AMD, driving significant revenue and earnings growth for AMD, while allowing OpenAI to accelerate their AI build-out and share directly in the upside of our mutual success,” she said.

The new partnership represents a significantly expanded relationship between the two companies after Su named OpenAI a “very early design partner” for AMD’s Instinct MI450GPU at her Advancing AI keynote in June.

The deal provides a major shot in the arm to AMD, which has spent the last few years mounting a significant challenge to Nvidia’s dominance of the AI computing space. Less than a month ago, Nvidia announced that it is investing $100 billion into OpenAI as part of a plan for the AI software giant to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia-based data centers.

As part of the new partnership, AMD said it has issued OpenAI a warrant for up to 160 million shares of AMD common stock. This warrant will vest in conjunction with the achievement of “specific milestones,” starting with the first gigawatt deployment of Instinct GPUs, which is expected to begin in the second half of 2026.

Milestones for future tranches of the warrant include further expansion of AMD’s Instinct GPU deployment with OpenAI, the chip designer’s share price hitting certain targets and OpenAI “achieving the technical and commercial milestones required to enable AMD deployments at scale,” according to the company.

On the webcast, Su said the deal gives AMD “clear line of sight to achieve our initial goal of tens of billion dollars of annual data center AI revenue starting in 2027.” She originally said in February that the company would achieve this goal in the “coming years” after disclosing that it had generated more than $5 billion from the segment last year.

The deal could result in AMD generating significant magnitudes of additional revenue from other customers, according to the CEO.

“We also believe that with the massive scale of this deployment and the strong benefits to the overall AMD AI ecosystem, this partnership will enable additional revenue from existing and new customers deploying at scale and has the potential to generate well over $100 billion in revenue over the next few years,” she said.

OpenAI’s 6-gigawatt deployment will begin with AMD’s Instinct MI450 and related rack-scale AI offerings, for which the company has a “significant number” of engagements with “other major companies,” according to Su.

This puts AMD “on a clear trajectory to capture a significant share of the global AI infrastructure build-out,” she said.