This deal is simply the most recent in a string of knowledge heart investments involving OpenAI and different tech companies. Shortly after his inauguration in January, US president Donald Trump announced that OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle would make investments $100 billion in constructing AI knowledge facilities on US soil and would pour as much as $500 billion into AI infrastructure over time.
The information heart gold rush hinges partly on the concept that fashions will enhance consistent with the legal guidelines of scaling—as long as they’re skilled on extra knowledge and compute. “There’s this fundamental story that scale is the factor, and that is been true for some time, and it’d nonetheless be true,” Jonathan Koomey, a visiting professor at UC Berkeley who research computing and knowledge heart effectivity, advised WIRED in September, speaking about an OpenAI-Oracle deal to create three new knowledge heart websites. “That is the wager that lots of the US AI firms are making.”
Derek Thompson, a distinguished economics reporter, famous in a recent post that the tech business is projected to spend round $400 billion on AI infrastructure this yr—whereas demand for AI companies from US customers stands at nearly $12 billion a yr, according to one study.
OpenAI had a strategic relationship with AMD previous to as we speak’s announcement. At AMD’s Advancing AI occasion in Silicon Valley in June, Altman briefly joined AMD CEO Lisa Su on stage. Su mentioned that AMD has been getting suggestions from clients for just a few years as the corporate has been designing the upcoming MI400 collection of chips, and that OpenAI is a kind of marquee clients.
Altman famous on stage that the business’s transfer towards reasoning fashions has been placing strain on AI mannequin makers when it comes to effectivity and long-context rollouts and that OpenAI wants “tons of compute, tons of reminiscence, and tons of CPUs,” along with the Nvidia GPUs that the generative AI business is so reliant on.
Su, at that occasion, described Altman as a “nice good friend” and an “icon in AI.”
Lauren Goode contributed to this report.
Replace 10/02/25 3:00pm ET: This story has been up to date to incorporate further remark AMD.
