It seems to basically give OpenAI an incentive to go thru with the deal.
The role the software played to get NVIDIA from a run-of-the-mill video card manufacturer to the top dog in AI hardware with 4T market cap is often underappreciated. My 2c.
It does but they have a capable CEO with a vision and broad support from the board - Ryzen was a decade long over night success.
Maybe also worth noting that some of the worlds largest supercomputers (e.g. Oak Ridge "Frontier" exascale computer) are based on AMD AI processors - I've no idea what drivers/libraries are being used to program these, but presumably they are reliable. I doubt they are using CUDA compatibility libraries.
You can see this play out in the history of OpenAI. NVIDIA supported them from an early stage and in exchange received OpenAI equity to offset the risk. Now from a position of relative strength, OpenAI has become concerned about vendor lock-in and so is rationally exploring AMD. Yet, because any such deal will materially impact AMD’s stock price and there is risk both of losing time trying to train with new chips as well as of benefiting competitors if they work with AMD to improve their hardware offerings/APIs, it is reasonable to ask for equity upside. So, for the same reasons (increase in stock price and enterprise client who will help improve their product offering) only without risk, is it understandable why AMD would want to offer equity on such favorable terms.
TLDR; My sense is that the sudden skepticism towards this relatively common enterprise deal structure seems to derive from the understandable interest in identifying signs of an AI bubble. Such a bubble may (and indeed almost certainly does) exist, but I don’t think this is evidence thereof.
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EDIT: I'm just clarifying something I saw in a lot of responses. My only point is that it is important to try and empirically tease out what represents: (1) a circular deal in which vendors facing the limits of growth are subsidizing vulnerable clients; versus (2) a risk-hedging deal in which a non-market leading vendor offers upside to a market leading client.
I believe the recent Oracle and NVIDIA deals are cases of (1) that provide evidence of an AI bubble, but that this AMD deal is most likely a case of (2) that provides no further evidence.
I think the skepticism comes from the recent OpenAI/Oracle deal which seemed kind of circular due to paying with equity whose value was being inflated by the deal itself (if I understand it correctly). This deal seems more like an outright gift of equity if OpenAI goes through with the deal - so it could be thought of as almost a rebate or net discount on the cost of the GPUs.
As @stingraycharles notes above, the AMD stock went up a lot already and this "may finally enable AMD to get a foot in the door in the whole large scale AI market."
Again, I'm in no way denying either that (1) exists or that there's almost certainly an AI bubble -- I just think this difference is material.
For example, I would classify the recently proposed deal between NVIDIA and OpenAI as a case of (1), but this deal between AMD and OpenAI as (2). Namely, because I think it's clear that the chips act as well as recent advancements by Chinese manufacturers are threatening to NVIDIA's market-leading position and OpenAI investigating new vendors suggests they have suddenly become concerned with reducing cost of goods. Indeed, if both the leading Chinese firms and OpenAI were shown to be able to work with other vendors without sacrificing speed to market it would materially impact NVIDIA's stock price. AMD, on the other hand, is not trying to subsidize an existing client, but convince a market leader to take a risk.
The NVIDIA deal, then, suggests to me that certain limits have been reached in the industry, while the AMD deal does not provide me with any further evidence as to the existence of a bubble.
Not that I disagree that this looks weird. Why was that needed to be offered? Couldn't they just buy the AMD chips if they're good enough? Or Nvidia is it's better?
I also don't get why there commiting so much to the future, are they sure of the quality of the products and their demand that much?
OpenAI would presumably need to raise money to buy the AMD chips.
The "genius" of this deal is that AMD is "giving away" 10% of the company (at $0.01/share) to OpenAI. Then OpenAI will presumably turn around and sell those shares (or borrow against them) to raise enough money to purchase the AMD GPUs.
There's no giving away of anything in the deal. The $0.01 per share price is only available if they purchase the GPUs.
It's more like one of those "free with purchase" deals where you're still paying for the product, but they throw in something to sweeten the deal.
They're not actually getting AMD shares at $0.01 each with no strings attached like many of the comments are assuming.
I have to ask - is this even legal? I understand it can be, but somehow it feels wrong. I guess AMD would report revenue of those GPU sale and equity issuance / dilution as part of payment terms, and OpenAI would record hardware purchase expense as well as investment income or maybe capital gain when selling those shares. What makes it legal is probably it all needs to be transparently communicated in time?
If that were true, there would never be any business that failed.
This really isn't the sign of a healthy economy.
Also, this would battle test AMD's platform and provide enhancements so it's also a beta-testing service.
Existing AMD shareholders will have their holding diluted.
Or assuming banks loan them money, if say OpenAI goes under then the banks just lose that money.
> I think at least part of the 10% is if AMD stock reaches 600.
AMD market cap today is $350B (at $200/share).
AMD would need to 3x their market cap ($1,000B) to be at $600/share.
Which would mean that OpenAI could gain $100B in AMD stock, for the minuscule cost of only $1.6 million (160 million shares at 1 cent each).
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Sam is spinning the world on his finger tip with these deals he's crafting.
Is it that Sam promises to somehow make AMD increase their market cap, or help at least?
The other $300B
Sorry, this isn't sarcasm or anything like it. I just don't get it and your answer does not help.
I've been saying this for several years now and it seems that someone finally listened :)
It seems like to take a 350M market cap company to 2B+ or a 6x+ increase in stock price would be worth doing for a few hundred million dollar investment in software and such?
That was my reaction too, this sort of weird deal seems very Sam Altman style.
Like Elon Musk - ironically, the archenemies are very stylistically similar.
It's one big game of musical chairs, and everyone can hear the phonograph slowing down.
OpenAI is making these desperation plays because they've ran out of hype. GPT-5 "bombed", the wider public doesn't believe AI is going to keep getting exponentially better anymore. They're out of options to generate new hype beyond spewing ever larger numbers into the news cycle.
AMD is making this desperation play because soon, once the AI bubble pops, there'll be a flood of cheap unused GPUs & GPU compute. Nobody's going to be buying their new cards when you can get Nvidia's prior gen for pennies on the dollar.
- GPT 3.5: Good for finding reference terms. I could not trust anything it said, but it could help me find some general terms in fields I was unfamiliar with.
- GPT 4: Good for cached, obscure knowledge. I generally could trust the stuff it said to be true, but none of its logic or conclusions.
- GPT 4.5: Good for reference proofs/code. I cannot trust its proofs or code, but I can get a decent outline for writing my own.
- GPT 5: Good for directed thinking. I cannot trust it to come up with the best solution on its own, but if I tell it what I'm working on, it's pretty decent at using all the tricks in its repertoire (across many fields) to get me a correct solution. I can trust its proofs or code to be about as correct as my own. My main issues are I cannot trust it to point out confusion or ask me, "is this actually the problem we should be solving here?" My guess is this is mostly a byproduct of shallow human feedback, rather than an actual issue with intelligence (as it will often ask me at the end of spending a bunch of computation if I want to try something mildly different).
For me, GPT 5 is way more useful than the previous models, because I don't have a lot of paper-pushing problems I'm trying to solve. My guess is the wider public may disagree because it's hard to tell the difference between something better at the task than you, and something much better.
I used scare quotes for a reason. It didn't "bomb" in the sense of failing [insert metric], it bombed in the sense that OpenAI needed it to generate exponentially more hype and it just didn't. (And on a lesser level, GPT-5 was supposed to cut OpenAI's costs but has failed to do so)
> I can trust its proofs or code to be about as correct as my own.
I have little to say about this, as I find such claims to be broadly irreplicable. GPT-5 scores better on the metrics, but still has the same "classes" of faults.
AMD did this deal because it's literally offering financing to them. OpenAI doesn't have access to capital markets like AMD does. So it's selling off shares of its own stock to finance the purchase of billions of dollars worth of GPUs. And the trick appears to be working since the stock is up 30% today, meaning it has paid for itself and then some.
Now it seems clear that what’s missing is another architectural leap like transformers, likely many different ones. That could come from almost anywhere? Or what makes this something where big tech is the only potential source of innovation?
Neurosymbolic architectures are the future, but I think LLMs have a place as orchestrators and translators from natural language -> symbolic representation. I'm working on an article that lays out a pretty strong case for a lot of this based on ~30 studies, hopefully I can tighten it up and publish soon.
At best, they can sell their IP to BigTech, who will then commercialize it.
It's a bubble. The tricks keep working until they suddenly don't, and then all the prior tricks unwind themselves.
Obviously, for the stock price to go up money needs to come from somewhere. It makes sense that this deal would lower the NVidia stock price, so technically it will be NVidia investors waiting too long to respond to this news that will be paying for this. A tax on the mistaken believe that NVidia has an monopoly on putting transitions in a particular configuration which they obviously don't. The rest is just momentum and this would kill that.
The real winners will be TSMC and ASML
Not convinced that’s true anymore in current climate. Bigger numbers announcements and AI Pixie dust works too apparently lol
If you just print money and nothing else, it inflates and becomes worthless affecting all involved.
If the money turns into technical progress or products then the entire economy grows.
In a strictly commercial sense yes but stock markets decoupled from that long ago. Whether it’s wallstreetbets up to shenanigans or a market crash it’s got little to do with actual future and more With sentiments. You’d hope it would revert to fundamentals eventually but markets sure seem happy to not do that
What is "actual future" ? Obviously we can only have feelings for it, not knowledge, right ?
I suppose the increased savings means there more potential for the private sector to cause inflation if everyone decides to dissave at once, but that's sorta a last resort.
NVIDIA doesn't place transistors in particular configurations. Foundries do that for them. And it is currently common sense that the software is the moat, not the hardware design.
Good luck changing the ecosystem to use AMD.
For inference that’s hardly relevant, though?
For training its not exactly insurmountable either.
Imagine you have 1 million GPUs and you have 99% utilization of theoretical performance in the system with inferencing. That would mean 10k of GPUs are basically idle and draw power. You could now try to identify which ones are idle but you won't find them because utilization is a dynamic process so while all GPUs are under load not all are running 100% performance beause of interconnects and networking not providing data fast enough so your whole network becomes a bottleneck.
So what you need is a very smart routing process of computation requirements on the whole cluster. This is pure SW issue and not HW issue. This is the SW Nvidia has been working on for years and where AMD is years behing.
This is also why Jensen is absolutely right to say that competitors can offer their chips for free because Nvidia's key in TCO performance is the idea of one giant GPU so SW and networking allowing for highest utilization of a data center. You can't build a GPU the size of 1 million GPUs so you have to think of the utilization problem of a network of GPUs.
In the real world utilization rates are way below 100% so every % better of utilization is way more worth than the price of single GPUs. The idea here is that the company providing 2-3x higher utilization can easily ask for like 5x higher pricing per chip and will still deliver a better TCO.
From that perspective the notion that NVidia will own this AI future while others such as AMD and Intel standby, would be silly.
Im already surprised it took this long. The NVidia moat might he software, but not anything that warrants these kind of margins at this scale. It is likely there will be strong price competition on hardware for inference.
What makes you think? Or are all non Nvidia GPUs x86?
So open ai are getting a 32.8 billion dollars rebate. But on what? Here the press releases are a bit vague. They say that Open ai committed to buying six gigawatts of AMD chips. Anybody know how to convert that into money?
If these are somewhere in the range of $10-30k (who knows what current or future models are contemplated), that's $30-180B. So clearly the low end doesn't make sense for the 'rebate', but at the high end a ~17% discount doesn't seem unreasonable.
MI350 spec sheet says it's 1000 watts typical. So we're talking about something on the scale of a couple million chips.
Ha ha, OpenAI can afford this because your mom uses a grand total of 7 pieces of software owned by 5 companies, 4 are the largest public companies in the world, and the 5th one is OpenAI.
If this ship sinks they are all going down together.
Edit: Apparently what Microsoft owns is 49% profit-sharing interest in OpenAI, specifically in the 'capped profit' for profit subsidiary. So weird, but hey, it's still a slice of the pie. Plus they can exclusively sell access to the models.
Also microsoft is pushing copilot to office and I think it will sell. Since they sell to general B2B and not only to the peogrammer niche.
AMD is trying to buy market share by donating 10% equity. I also think it is crazy
On the other note, it also helps OpenAI because they don't have to manage setting up all that infrastructure just to let others use the model.
Yes, you are reading it wrong. The big winner here is AMD, not OpenAI.
If there is any signal here, it's that AMD is still in the AI game. AMD stock is up 30% on this news.
I think there are logical reasons for both companies to agree to this deal. AMD is trying to break CUDA dominance. OpenAI is getting extremely cheap compute for expansion and they'd also benefit from the Nvidia monopoly falling if that ever happens.
In case you're wondering how OpenAI could afford to buy 10% of AMD while they are hemorrhaging money -- the terms of the deal allows OpenAI to buy 160 million shares at 1 cents a share.
I could be thinking about this the wrong way but it appears that AMD is basically subsidizing the cost of the GPUs with equity.