OpenAI has agreed to buy tens of billions of dollars’ worth of chips from AMD as part of a deal that could see the ChatGPT maker take a 10 per cent stake in the $270bn chipmaker over time.
The US-based artificial intelligence start-up said it had agreed to purchase processors with a total power consumption of 6 gigawatts — roughly equivalent to Singapore’s average demand — sending the US-based chipmaker’s shares as much as 30 per cent higher yesterday.
The companies did not put a total figure on the transaction, but OpenAI executives estimate that 1GW of capacity costs about $50bn to bring online, with two-thirds of that spent on chips and the infrastructure to support them.
The deal comes just a fortnight after AMD rival Nvidia said that it planned to invest $100bn in OpenAI, with the two companies pledging to deploy 10GW of new data centre capacity.
AMD has also issued OpenAI a warrant to purchase as many as 160mn shares at an exercise price of $0.01 over time based on AMD’s “achieving certain share price targets” and OpenAI deploying its chips. That would equate to about 10 per cent of the company.
