Remember when AMD was basically the scrappy underdog getting dunked on by Nvidia in the AI chip game? Well, plot twist: they just landed a deal that has Silicon Valley doing double-takes and Nvidia probably stress-eating in their break room.
AMD stock absolutely exploded 38% on Monday after announcing they’re now OpenAI’s new BFF in the chip department. We’re talking a jump to $226.71 that had traders frantically googling “is this real life?” The answer: very real, and very spicy.
Here’s the tea: OpenAI (you know, the ChatGPT people who basically broke the internet) just signed a multi-year deal with AMD to power their AI infrastructure. Starting in Q2 2026, AMD will be deploying their Instinct MI450 GPUs to help OpenAI handle their ever-growing army of AI models. The scale? A whopping 6 gigawatts of power across multiple generations of tech.
But wait, there’s more! (I know, I sound like a late-night infomercial, but stick with me.) OpenAI also gets the option to buy a 10% stake in AMD through a warrant for 160 million shares. That’s not just a business deal—that’s basically OpenAI saying “we’re so confident in you, we want to own a piece of the action.”
Now, why is this such a big deal? Well, just a few weeks ago, everyone was talking about Nvidia’s massive $100 billion partnership with OpenAI. AMD was looking like the friend who didn’t get invited to the cool kids’ party. Suddenly, they’ve got their own invitation, and it’s written in gold.
“This partnership is a major step in building the compute capacity needed to realize AI’s full potential,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, probably while Nvidia executives somewhere were having an emergency meeting titled “How Did This Happen?”
The beauty of this move? AMD just proved they’re not content being Nvidia’s little sibling anymore. They’re playing in the same league, with the same heavyweight clients, and their stock price is basically doing victory laps around the track.
For investors, this is huge. AMD’s year-to-date gains hit 88% at the peak, which is the kind of performance that makes your portfolio do a happy dance. More importantly, it shows that the AI chip market isn’t a Nvidia monopoly—there’s room for competition, and AMD just claimed their seat at the big kids’ table.
The real kicker? This deal doesn’t start until 2026, which means we’re just seeing the beginning. If AMD can deliver on this partnership and prove they can hang with the AI big leagues, we might be looking at a completely different competitive landscape in the chip world.
So yeah, AMD just went from underdog to co-main event, and Nvidia’s probably updating their LinkedIn profiles as we speak. Game on.