After AMD and OpenAI introduced an expanded partnership on Monday, the chatter instantly turned to the bizarre method OpenAI would pay for its AMD purchases. It’s going to use AMD’s personal inventory to take action.
To recap: OpenAI has agreed to assist AMD refine its line of Nvidia competitor chips, the Intuition GPUs, in addition to to buy and deploy 6 gigawatts of compute capability from AMD over a number of years. AMD mentioned this deal is price billions in income.
However OpenAI isn’t paying for this out of its personal revenues. As a substitute AMD has granted OpenAI a boatload of inventory warrants — as much as 160 million AMD shares — which is able to vest in tranches as sure milestones are achieved. These milestones embrace particular will increase within the inventory value, with the final tranche depending on AMD shares hovering to $600 apiece, AMD disclosed. They have been buying and selling at about $165 earlier than the information hit and soared to $214 by market shut Monday after the announcement.
If the inventory value hits its marks, and OpenAI achieves all its required contributions, and OpenAI holds all of AMD’s shares, not promoting any alongside the best way, OpenAI could make sufficient on AMD inventory to pay for lots of GPUs. The inventory may very well be price about $100 billion.
“We might be aware that the ultimate sixth tranche requires ~$1T market cap to vest – ergo, if OAI have been to carry inventory till the tip of the deal, its stake could be price ~$100B,” writes UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri in a analysis be aware on Tuesday.
However Arcuri believes {that a} extra doubtless state of affairs is that OpenAI will promote its AMD inventory alongside the best way to pay its AMD invoice. So, basically, it is a scheme for AMD to finance this buyer’s purchases.
Nonetheless, Arcuri argues, the validation that AMD’s AI GPUs can deal with OpenAI workloads, and ergo some other AI workloads, is effective sufficient for AMD to make this financing gambit. “AMD highlighted ongoing buyer dialogs past OpenAI and expects this settlement to in the end speed up AMD adoption momentum,” he writes. Specifically, OpenAI’s stamp of approval provides it an in to promote its GPUs to the various cloud service suppliers it already supplies with CPUs.
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So in the long term, those who will really be paying for OpenAI’s large multi-year buy of AMD GPUs will probably be retail and institutional traders in the event that they do certainly bid the inventory value up.
In some ways Nvidia can also be financing OpenAI’s purchases of Nvidia’s wares with its personal $100 billion funding announced last month. The distinction, in fact, is that Nvidia’s a number of investments in OpenAI has granted Nvidia a stake within the fast-growing AI supplier, not the opposite method round.
However what selection did AMD have? By financially engineering a deal that prices OpenAI little, it will get a big foothold — as a lot as 30% market share, USB estimates — into one of many biggest build-outs of next-generation information facilities the world has ever seen.
Whereas Arcuri admits that AMD’s deal is “arguably much less engaging” than Nvidia’s, “we see this as a serious validation of its [AMD’s] roadmap that would snowball to different prospects.”
