After AMD and OpenAI announced an expanded partnership on Monday, the chatter immediately turned to the unusual way OpenAI would pay for its AMD purchases. It will use AMD's own stock to do so. To recap: OpenAI has agreed to help AMD refine its line of Nvidia competitor chips, the Instinct GPUs, as well as to purchase and deploy 6 gigawatts of compute capacity from AMD over multiple years. AMD said this deal is worth billions in revenue.
The companies signed the letters of intent following a meeting in Seoul between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, South Korea's president Lee Jae-myung, Samsung Electronics' executive chairman Jay Y. Lee, and SK chairman Chey Tae-won. Under the deal, Samsung and SK Hynix plan to scale their manufacturing to produce up to 900,000 high-bandwidth memory DRAM memory chips per month for use in Stargate and AI data centers.
"If you just reduce compute to capital, you know, it's just money, and then you buy the physical infra," Kwon said. "We don't necessarily assume in lots of other industries or even in technology industries that if you're just the most capitalized company or organization, that you're automatically going to win." "It's how you make use of that resource and apply it to various bets," he added.
