- AMD is the latest to bag a major deal with AI giant OpenAI
- Analysts said having a headline partner will bring new opportunities for AMD
- The company now expects to achieve multi-billion-dollar AI data center revenue by 2027
AMD has faced an uphill battle against Nvidia for AI factory market share, but it seems the company just caught a huge break. The chipmaker inked a partnership deal with industry leader OpenAI to deploy 6 GW worth of AMD’s Instinct GPUs, with an initial 1 GW set to roll out in the back half of 2026.
What does that 6 GW figure mean in practical terms? Well, Moor Insights and Strategy VP and Principal Analyst Matt Kimball did the math, and it factors out to between 3.5 million and 5 million AMD GPUs (as well as plenty of AMD’s EPYC CPUs as well).
On a call with investors, AMD CEO Lisa Su said the deal has the potential to generate “well over $100 billion in revenue” over the next few years. She added revenue from the arrangement is expected to start flowing in the second half of next year, contributing “double digit billions of annual incremental data center AI revenue once it ramps.”
That’s great news for AMD’s balance sheet. But both Moor Insights and Strategy Founder Patrick Moorhead and J. Gold Associates Founder Jack Gold said the partnership is likely to open new doors for AMD.
Gold told Fierce the deal is essentially “an endorsement that AMD has become competitive with Nvidia processing power, as well as enhancing its [software] strategy to compete, much as it did in the data center market earlier against Intel.”
He added, “It’s highly likely that other major AI players will follow suit and deploy AMD powered data centers, even more so than with the current movement with AMD GPUs seen as the secondary supplier.”
Moorhead agreed, positing that having such a high-profile deal in place with OpenAI will help it attract more Tier 1 customers. Indeed, Su said AMD has a “significant number” of GPU engagements underway with other major customers.
Just last week, AMD announced it would be building a “large cluster of AMD Instinct MI300X GPUs on IBM Cloud” for open-source AI company Zyphra. On the OpenAI side, the AMD partnership follows blockbuster deals with Oracle and Nvidia.
Between the OpenAI deal and the other conversations it is having, Su said AMD now has “clear line of sight” to achieving tens of billions in data center AI revenue by 2027.