AMD-OpenAI multi-billion-dollar deal challenges Nvidia's dominance

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) on Monday announced a landmark multi-billion-dollar agreement with OpenAI and turned up the heat on Nvidia, which currently dominates the chips space. The partnership sent AMD shares rallying over 25% in early trading.

Deal contours

According to a joint statement, AMD will provide OpenAI with the latest version of its high performance graphics chips expected to debut next year.


It calls for supplying 6 gigawatts of computing power for OpenAI’s next generation AI infrastructure, with the first gigawatt coming online in the second half of 2026.

AMD also issued a warrant that allows OpenAI to buy up to 160 million shares of AMD’s common stock, which amounts to about 10% of company. The warrant will vest based on two milestones tied to the amount of computing power deployed.

Challenging Nvidia

This is a key deal for AMD which has been left behind Nvidia in the AI race, and comes weeks after Nvidia and OpenAI signed a contract for more than $100 billion worth of equipment intended to increase OpenAI's generative AI capabilities.

Most importantly, this deal diversifies OpenAI’s supply of AI hardware, cutting its reliance on Nvidia, which currently has an estimated 80% of the market in AI accelerators.

By deploying 6 gigawatts of AMD’s Instinct GPUs, OpenAI is putting its weight behind AMD’s chips, making them competitive with Nvidia’s in both scale and performance. This is expected to drive broader adoption of AMD’s solutions, nibbling away some market from Nvidia’s near-monopoly.

From a technical perspective, AMD’s latest Instinct GPUs now have greater memory and match or exceed Nvidia’s equivalent Blackwell and Hopper series products in multiple benchmarks, including memory bandwidth, inference latency, and price-performance for large language models (LLMs).

Through this five-year partnership, OpenAI will also help shape the design of future AMD chips, to make them more specific for advanced generative AI workloads.

The deal’s unique warrant mechanism makes OpenAI a potential strategic shareholder in AMD. This means tens of billions in projected revenue for AMD, building pressure on Nvidia to compete not just on hardware features, but supply, pricing, and strategic flexibility.