OpenAI’s Major AMD Partnership Reflects Confidence in Soaring AI Demand

This agreement is merely the latest in a series of investments in data centers by OpenAI and other technology companies. Shortly after taking office in January, US President Donald Trump revealed plans for OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle to invest $100 billion in the construction of AI data centers within the United States, with a commitment of up to $500 billion towards AI infrastructure over time.

The rush to build data centers is partly based on the belief that model performance will improve according to scaling laws, provided they are trained with more data and computation resources. “The fundamental narrative is that scale is crucial, which has been true for some time and may still hold,” remarked Jonathan Koomey, a visiting professor at UC Berkeley focusing on computing and data center efficiency, in a WIRED interview from September, discussing an OpenAI-Oracle agreement to establish three new data center locations. “This is the gamble that many US AI companies are making.”

Derek Thompson, a well-known economics journalist, highlighted in a recent article that the technology sector is expected to spend nearly $400 billion on AI infrastructure this year, while the demand for AI services from US consumers is approximately $12 billion annually, according to a study.

Prior to the latest announcement, OpenAI maintained a strategic partnership with AMD. During AMD’s Advancing AI event in Silicon Valley in June, Altman briefly took the stage with AMD CEO Lisa Su. Su indicated that AMD has been gathering customer insights over the years while developing the upcoming MI400 series of chips, with OpenAI being one of its primary clients.

During the event, Altman emphasized that the industry’s shift towards reasoning models is creating demands for greater efficiency and extended context management, stating that OpenAI requires “an abundance of compute, memory, and CPUs,” in addition to the Nvidia GPUs that are essential to the generative AI sector.

Su characterized Altman as a “great friend” and an “icon in AI” at the event.

Lauren Goode contributed to this report.

Update 10/02/25 3:00pm ET: This story has been updated to include additional comments from AMD.