In the world of artificial intelligence, the lines between customer, partner, and shareholder are blurring. The latest headline-grabbing move? OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has signed a deal with chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to supply it with artificial intelligence chips.
But this isn’t just a purchase, it’s a strategic alliance. AMD will supply six gigawatts of its Instinct Graphics Processing Units to power OpenAI’s next-gen infrastructure, starting in 2026. In return, OpenAI gets warrants for 160 million AMD shares at one cent apiece, vesting as deployment milestones are hit and which could be worth tens of billions of dollars. That’s not just a vote of confidence—it’s a power move.
And AMD isn’t alone. Nvidia recently pledged a $100 billion investment in OpenAI, aiming to deploy 10 gigawatts of AI data centres with Nvidia systems. Intel, meanwhile, received a $5 billion injection from Nvidia to co-develop custom Central Processing Units for its AI platforms. Are you keeping up with this?
What we’re witnessing is a new era of ‘inter-investing’ among AI giants—a web of cross-holdings, joint ventures, and infrastructure co-dependencies. These deals aren’t just about securing supply chains; they’re about locking in influence and shaping the future of AI itself. The deals might also be about making each individual company ‘too big to fail’.
For investors, this also signals a shift. Traditional boundaries between hardware and software firms are dissolving. The winners won’t just be those who build the best chips or models—they’ll be those who control the ecosystem. As AI races toward artificial general intelligence (the hypothetical stage where an AI system can match or exceed the cognitive abilities of human beings across any task) the stakes are high. In this game, it now seems that collaboration is the new competition.
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