Amd Signs AI Chip-Supply Deal with Openai, Gives It Option to Take a 10% Stake
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
reuters.comOtherstoryHigh profile
heatednegative
Debate
85/100
Artificial IntelligenceGPU MarketFinancial Deals
Key topics
Artificial Intelligence
GPU Market
Financial Deals
AMD signs a $100B AI chip supply deal with OpenAI, giving OpenAI an option to buy 10% of AMD's shares at $0.01 each, sparking concerns about the financial sustainability and potential bubble in the AI industry.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
13m
Peak period
151
0-12h
Avg / period
26.7
Comment distribution160 data points
Loading chart...
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Oct 6, 2025 at 8:17 AM EDT
3 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Oct 6, 2025 at 8:31 AM EDT
13m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
151 comments in 0-12h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Oct 12, 2025 at 1:22 PM EDT
3 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 45490549Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 8:14:16 PM
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
Those GPU's will finally push pixels again :)
Just like we knew self-driving AIs are not reliable.
The magical thinking was assuming they would just get better.
> Those GPU's will finally push pixels again :)
Have they ever? I wonder if, say, an H100 even supports graphics APIs.
Funnily enough, H100s are already old hardware, and soon will all get fully depreciated.
Billions and billions of depreciated assets!
There will definitely be takers though. Can see scientific community for example loving some cheap GPUs
It's "seller financing" but to a degree we've never seen before in an industry (which create these "circular" effects).
There's a good HN thread from 2-days ago on this subject (200+ comments).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45473033
Maybe I can get quoted in a sidebar:
“Hey Econ students, we normal people could see that the AI market was extremely gamed. We can see the investment feedback loop. It is just that the organizations continuing it have control over so much money, they don’t have to stop and ask society in general for permission to continue. Really this is a symptom of the wealth inequality crisis that they covered chapter…”
The reasoning behind such a deal are usually not a good sign for the underlying health of the companies involved.
It certainly wouldn't be for fear of a lack of investment. AMD is up 30% from this announcement alone.
OpenAI may own 10% of AMD, and that seems like OpenAI investing in AMD in exchange for buying 6GW of GPUs and 160million in stock.
But if it results in their stock reaching 600$, then AMD will give back the money that OpenAI spent on GPUs as 10% stock options into AMD.
Which sounds like, no one is really investing in each other, they're both like exchanging money back and forth, where both hope to gain some extra money by propping up the AMD stock with the announcement, hoping it helps make AMD more competitive on the GPU landscape.
Did I get it right?
So day 1 valuation is mostly hype, but that hype may translate into real value later.
After the predicted bloodbath, do we get some infrastructure and products worth keeping at the end of it? If so, does that mean the system can limp on, after even more money has printed, or do we get to another big fork in the road where systematic change is required?
Completely agree, I’d expect all of those to take a big hit, and some more than others, but I don’t think Microsoft or Google would disappear. As for the SP issue, if this trend continues, people might start seeing the SP as the opposite of diversification (at least in the stocks market sense) and will have to start looking for something else.
BTW, I’m almost an all-in SP investor myself so I’ll have to navigate that dip too, lol
A local model basically allows me to experiment with running an agent 24x7, 365 days a year with continuous prompting.
SaaS won't be able to match that.
At work:
That I don't rent $30,000 a month of PTUs from Microsoft. That I can put more restricted data classifications into it.
> LLM inferencing isn't particularly constrained by Internet latency
But user experience is
The general advantage is that you know that you're not leaking information, because there's nowhere to leak it to. You know the exact input, because you provided it. You also get the benefit of being able to have on device encryption, the data is no good in the datacenter if it's encrypted.
Sora 2 takes a lot of visual shortcuts. The innovation is how it does the story planning, vocals, music, and lipsync.
We'll have that locally in 6 months.
If I had to guess I would say that's probably 10 or 15 years away for desktop class hardware and longer for mobile (maybe another 10 years).
Maybe the frontier models of 2040 are being used for more advanced things like medical research and not generating CRUD apps or photos of kittens. That would mean that the average person is likely using the commodity models that are either free or extremely cheap to use.
I've been using Qwen3:32b on a 32GB M1 (asahi) and it does most of what I need, albeit a bit slow, but not slow enough that I´d pay monthly for remote ad delivery.
I suspect this huge splurge of hardware spending is partially an attempt to starve the market of cheap RAM and thus limit companies releasing 128GB/256GB standalone LLM boxes.
This is money printing, just in the private sector. We know what happens when governments do it, and it's not good.
It could be bad sure but it’s not money printing
It's like in that movie "Social network"
If I finance a car backed by hopes and dreams, I'd be driving real good.
What these recent deals do is inflate asset prices by making (future) revenues appear higher or perhaps just more certain than they really are.
Assets can be used as collateral for loans. If someone were to use their AMD shares as collateral for a loan at a commercial bank (not a margin loan), that would be money printing and you could print more of it today than before the deal was announced.
I'm not outraged at all, I just think this sort of bizarre financial engineering is not a good sign. If the ROI was so obvious, why not, for example, simply issue bonds and buy AMD stock on the open market?
It bears repeating my original question: if the risks are so minor, why is OpenAI simply not issuing bonds and buying AMD stock with the proceeds?
> Do you recall what “people familiar with finance” did with CDOs and mortgage-backed securities during the financial crisis? That didn’t work out so well either, despite all parties being aware of the risks.
There was straight up fraud involved in the underwriting for the mortgages where verification (or rather underwriting itself) was not being done.
This deal is a transparent bet on an outcome with no deceived party.
> and no one has access to more money due to the contract signed between the two parties
If a third party decides to pay a higher price for a publicly listed share because of the news of this contract, that is not printing money. The buyer of the shares loses money, the seller gains it, for a net change of zero in money supply.
ALL ELSE BEING EQUAL this means everyone holding AMD has 10% of their equity/value taken away and handed to OpenAI.
But all else is not equal. OpenAI only gets the shares if they buy AMD GPUs. The intent is that this offsets the dilution by making AMD overall more valuable. (This is why the stock price jumped on the announcement) It's a GPU subsidy paid for by AMD's shareholders rather than AMD itself.
The real risk is that this further entangles AMD in the AI bubble. OpenAI already has enormous datacenter construction obligations. The likelihood of them failing to meet these new obligations, and thus this deal falling through or otherwise not materialising, is pretty high. If the AI bubble goes *POP*, AMD will be hurting a lot more than before this deal.
But the stock is up 30% on the news. So lose 10%, but gain 30%, so net 20% beneficial to equity holders?
But yes. That's the intent.
The "problem" is that OpenAI doesn't have any of the shares yet, and it's unclear how much they actually will get. Right now AMD shareholders have the full +30% gain with none of the loss. But will the +30% gain be wiped out on the news OpenAI won't be buying as many AMD GPUs? Only time can tell.
The first 0.1% of shareholders to sell would get the full +30%, then the next 0.1% would get ~28%, then the next... and by the time you got down to the last of the initial shareholders trying to liquidate, the price would likely be pennies on the dollar.
This is not value, but hot air.
The value these things represent is based almost entirely on the myth/hype + 401k index fund growth + inflation expectations at this point.
If you don't get dividends or voting power from your shares, all you have left is liquidation rights in the event of a bankruptcy. So, the shares are really worth their share of ~whatever AMD's assets are worth in a bankruptcy.
But, because we trade them in public markets, they're immediately worth whatever someone else will pay. And that's basically much more tethered to myth (and consistent 401k index fund growth + inflation expectations) than to fundamentals at this point.
Right now, 401k funds are buying AMD at this higher share price, with zero due diligence!
So, if growth stops / if job losses explode, then 401k contributions slow down (or reverse!), then markets fall, then margin calls happen, then markets fall more, more job losses...
There's a lot of cash sloshing around in the system from all the 2020s money printing, and there's a perma-buy-the-dip mentality that has come out of this extreme bull market (bubble market), so there is quite some extra resilience; but, the coyote is really going to have a reckoning once it finally looks down...
In case you're wondering how OpenAI could afford to buy 10% of AMD while they are hemorrhaging money -- the terms of the deal allows OpenAI to buy 160 million shares at 1 cents a share.
I could be thinking about this the wrong way but it appears that AMD is basically subsidizing the cost of the GPUs with equity.
Edit: Apparently what Microsoft owns is 49% profit-sharing interest in OpenAI, specifically in the 'capped profit' for profit subsidiary. So weird, but hey, it's still a slice of the pie. Plus they can exclusively sell access to the models.
Also microsoft is pushing copilot to office and I think it will sell. Since they sell to general B2B and not only to the peogrammer niche.
AMD is trying to buy market share by donating 10% equity. I also think it is crazy
On the other note, it also helps OpenAI because they don't have to manage setting up all that infrastructure just to let others use the model.
Not that I disagree that this looks weird. Why was that needed to be offered? Couldn't they just buy the AMD chips if they're good enough? Or Nvidia is it's better?
I also don't get why there commiting so much to the future, are they sure of the quality of the products and their demand that much?
OpenAI would presumably need to raise money to buy the AMD chips.
The "genius" of this deal is that AMD is "giving away" 10% of the company (at $0.01/share) to OpenAI. Then OpenAI will presumably turn around and sell those shares (or borrow against them) to raise enough money to purchase the AMD GPUs.
Existing AMD shareholders will have their holding diluted.
Or assuming banks loan them money, if say OpenAI goes under then the banks just lose that money.
That said, this is really about the principal. Sure, if I give you $10 and you give me a hamburger it's not like some illegal transaction. But to say the $10 comes from thin air is wrong. It doesn't come from thin air.
I would bet that if one day OpenAI decided to sell 10% of AMD the stock would crash from $600 to below $150. IIUC, there's 1.6B shares of AMD while only 54M shares trade daily so dumping 160M shares would tank their price [1]. If AMD gives OpenAI 10% of the company and OpenAI goes under, it's going to take AMD's share price with it.
[1]: https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/amd
The rest of your comment doesn't make sense.
If OpenAI fails then its going to have to liquidate the company. Selling 160M shares of AMD is going to tank it's price.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lawsuits_involving_Tes...
[2]: https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-announces-new-long-...
Whatever the merits of the lawsuit, it wasn't about the pay package being too diluting.
If OpenAI fails, it will be acquired and/or the shares will be sold in bulk. They're not going to log in to etrade and sell 160m shares on the open market.
If that were true, there would never be any business that failed.
This really isn't the sign of a healthy economy.
There's no giving away of anything in the deal. The $0.01 per share price is only available if they purchase the GPUs.
It's more like one of those "free with purchase" deals where you're still paying for the product, but they throw in something to sweeten the deal.
They're not actually getting AMD shares at $0.01 each with no strings attached like many of the comments are assuming.
I have to ask - is this even legal? I understand it can be, but somehow it feels wrong. I guess AMD would report revenue of those GPU sale and equity issuance / dilution as part of payment terms, and OpenAI would record hardware purchase expense as well as investment income or maybe capital gain when selling those shares. What makes it legal is probably it all needs to be transparently communicated in time?
Also, this would battle test AMD's platform and provide enhancements so it's also a beta-testing service.
It's one big game of musical chairs, and everyone can hear the phonograph slowing down.
OpenAI is making these desperation plays because they've ran out of hype. GPT-5 "bombed", the wider public doesn't believe AI is going to keep getting exponentially better anymore. They're out of options to generate new hype beyond spewing ever larger numbers into the news cycle.
AMD is making this desperation play because soon, once the AI bubble pops, there'll be a flood of cheap unused GPUs & GPU compute. Nobody's going to be buying their new cards when you can get Nvidia's prior gen for pennies on the dollar.
AMD did this deal because it's literally offering financing to them. OpenAI doesn't have access to capital markets like AMD does. So it's selling off shares of its own stock to finance the purchase of billions of dollars worth of GPUs. And the trick appears to be working since the stock is up 30% today, meaning it has paid for itself and then some.
Now it seems clear that what’s missing is another architectural leap like transformers, likely many different ones. That could come from almost anywhere? Or what makes this something where big tech is the only potential source of innovation?
At best, they can sell their IP to BigTech, who will then commercialize it.
Are you saying you disagree that a new architectural leap is needed and just more compute for training is enough? Or are you saying a new architectural leap is needed and that or those new architectures will only be possible to train with insane amounts of compute?
If the latter I dont understand how you could know that about an innovation that’s not yet been made
In other words, it’s is MORE likely that an OpenAI/Google/Microsoft/Grok/Anthropic gets us closer to AGI than a startup we haven’t heard of yet. Simply because BigTech has cornered the market and has a de facto monopoly on compute itself. Even if you had raised $10 billion in VC funding, you literally can not buy GPUs because there is not enough manufacturing capacity in the world to fill your order. Thus, investors know this and capital is flowing to BigTech, rather than VC funds. Which creates the cycle of BigTech getting bigger, and squeezing out VC money for startups.
Neurosymbolic architectures are the future, but I think LLMs have a place as orchestrators and translators from natural language -> symbolic representation. I'm working on an article that lays out a pretty strong case for a lot of this based on ~30 studies, hopefully I can tighten it up and publish soon.
It's a bubble. The tricks keep working until they suddenly don't, and then all the prior tricks unwind themselves.
- GPT 3.5: Good for finding reference terms. I could not trust anything it said, but it could help me find some general terms in fields I was unfamiliar with.
- GPT 4: Good for cached, obscure knowledge. I generally could trust the stuff it said to be true, but none of its logic or conclusions.
- GPT 4.5: Good for reference proofs/code. I cannot trust its proofs or code, but I can get a decent outline for writing my own.
- GPT 5: Good for directed thinking. I cannot trust it to come up with the best solution on its own, but if I tell it what I'm working on, it's pretty decent at using all the tricks in its repertoire (across many fields) to get me a correct solution. I can trust its proofs or code to be about as correct as my own. My main issues are I cannot trust it to point out confusion or ask me, "is this actually the problem we should be solving here?" My guess is this is mostly a byproduct of shallow human feedback, rather than an actual issue with intelligence (as it will often ask me at the end of spending a bunch of computation if I want to try something mildly different).
For me, GPT 5 is way more useful than the previous models, because I don't have a lot of paper-pushing problems I'm trying to solve. My guess is the wider public may disagree because it's hard to tell the difference between something better at the task than you, and something much better.
I used scare quotes for a reason. It didn't "bomb" in the sense of failing [insert metric], it bombed in the sense that OpenAI needed it to generate exponentially more hype and it just didn't. (And on a lesser level, GPT-5 was supposed to cut OpenAI's costs but has failed to do so)
> I can trust its proofs or code to be about as correct as my own.
I have little to say about this, as I find such claims to be broadly irreplicable. GPT-5 scores better on the metrics, but still has the same "classes" of faults.
> I think at least part of the 10% is if AMD stock reaches 600.
AMD market cap today is $350B (at $200/share).
AMD would need to 3x their market cap ($1,000B) to be at $600/share.
Which would mean that OpenAI could gain $100B in AMD stock, for the minuscule cost of only $1.6 million (160 million shares at 1 cent each).
--
Sam is spinning the world on his finger tip with these deals he's crafting.
https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA
It seems like to take a 350M market cap company to 2B+ or a 6x+ increase in stock price would be worth doing for a few hundred million dollar investment in software and such?
I've been saying this for several years now and it seems that someone finally listened :)
Is it that Sam promises to somehow make AMD increase their market cap, or help at least?
The other $300B
Sorry, this isn't sarcasm or anything like it. I just don't get it and your answer does not help.
Predicting the end of bubbles is well known to be a fool's errand, but if this AI bubble is still going in a year I can only imagine how casually these companies will have to be throwing around multi-trillion dollar promises to each other to keep the stocks pumped up.
That reminds me a lot of Enron. As long as the stock keeps going up everything is fine but when it does t everything comes crashing down.
There are a host of different hypothesis you could pose to explain that. Maybe OpenAI has some secret sauce they'll share with AMD now that they have a stake. Maybe OpenAI will be more likely to buy from AMD in the future. Maybe AMD can use the experience they get serving OpenAI to better their products. Heck, maybe OpenAI will pump the stock by having Sam Altman talk about it on some podcasts.
It's impossible to disentangle all of those theories, because different investors will have different beliefs and you only get an aggregate.
Imho AMD itself needs to have a theory, which underpins their signing of the deal. For my clueless self, that investors have various theories and we don't know what they are is ok-ish, but that AMD has a theory but keeps it secret yet it gets the result of stock rise... is fishy.
Everyone is going in circles making suppositions and estimations based on who knows what. That can't be healty, can it? There used to be requirements that publicly listed companies act with some level of transparency, and those requirements existed for a reason. I guess. I am certainly no expert in finance.
It's not secret at all. Companies announcing a deal like this usually include some PR material alongside it [1]. In this one, the quote is:
"significant strategic alignment", "shareholder value", and "billions of dollars in revenue" are all things that should be expected to move the market cap. The "tens of billions in revenue" would generate upwards of 100 billion in market cap alone, assuming AMD's current multiple.[1]: https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-10-6-amd...
This would be where AMD is to gain new money.
OpenAI also has to gain, if it means access to more GPUs allows it to compete and be the winner of the LLM race. As the winner of the race, it would make new money, but also likely need to spend even more money on AMD to buy even more GPUs for years to come.
The issue here is now, that every large customer of AMD will now probably ask for equity. AMD has put itself into a pit hole with that deal.
If I were Hyperscaler CEO, I would basically ask for the a similiar deal as OpenAI or no business. Sorry Lisa Su but as a CEO giving equity to a customer is an absolute red flag because it starts a negative spirale you can't stop.
It seems that no matter the discount, OpenAI wasn't ready to make deal without equity. This tells you exactly how AMD is seen in the AI world.
OpenAI will take the compute for free and help AMD to rise stock value but it won't help AMD one bit because if AMD remains in the current position then OpenAI and Hyperscalers can get great deals with equity from AMD. The incentive isn't now to improve AMD to be competitive but to squeeze everything out of a company being desperate enough to give equity to customers.
And AMD will feel this. Nvidia will remain dominant because of ecosystem and supply. AMD can't easily replace Nvidia in supply chain and Nvidia is already strongly entrenched in many AI compute operations. And on the other side Hyperscalers are focused on their own chips (even OpenAI LOL) so they will tell AMD "Give us equity or no deal". This deal might be really the worst AMD deal yet because AMD is telling the world "here, you can get free AI compute from us financed by our equity". And while it might push AMD share price the very share price will drop 80-90% like any other one in case of an AI bubble pop.
That was my reaction too, this sort of weird deal seems very Sam Altman style.
Like Elon Musk - ironically, the archenemies are very stylistically similar.
Obviously, for the stock price to go up money needs to come from somewhere. It makes sense that this deal would lower the NVidia stock price, so technically it will be NVidia investors waiting too long to respond to this news that will be paying for this. A tax on the mistaken believe that NVidia has an monopoly on putting transitions in a particular configuration which they obviously don't. The rest is just momentum and this would kill that.
The real winners will be TSMC and ASML
NVIDIA doesn't place transistors in particular configurations. Foundries do that for them. And it is currently common sense that the software is the moat, not the hardware design.
Good luck changing the ecosystem to use AMD.
For inference that’s hardly relevant, though?
For training its not exactly insurmountable either.
From that perspective the notion that NVidia will own this AI future while others such as AMD and Intel standby, would be silly.
Im already surprised it took this long. The NVidia moat might he software, but not anything that warrants these kind of margins at this scale. It is likely there will be strong price competition on hardware for inference.
What makes you think? Or are all non Nvidia GPUs x86?
Imagine you have 1 million GPUs and you have 99% utilization of theoretical performance in the system with inferencing. That would mean 10k of GPUs are basically idle and draw power. You could now try to identify which ones are idle but you won't find them because utilization is a dynamic process so while all GPUs are under load not all are running 100% performance beause of interconnects and networking not providing data fast enough so your whole network becomes a bottleneck.
So what you need is a very smart routing process of computation requirements on the whole cluster. This is pure SW issue and not HW issue. This is the SW Nvidia has been working on for years and where AMD is years behing.
This is also why Jensen is absolutely right to say that competitors can offer their chips for free because Nvidia's key in TCO performance is the idea of one giant GPU so SW and networking allowing for highest utilization of a data center. You can't build a GPU the size of 1 million GPUs so you have to think of the utilization problem of a network of GPUs.
In the real world utilization rates are way below 100% so every % better of utilization is way more worth than the price of single GPUs. The idea here is that the company providing 2-3x higher utilization can easily ask for like 5x higher pricing per chip and will still deliver a better TCO.
Not convinced that’s true anymore in current climate. Bigger numbers announcements and AI Pixie dust works too apparently lol
If you just print money and nothing else, it inflates and becomes worthless affecting all involved.
If the money turns into technical progress or products then the entire economy grows.
210 more comments available on Hacker News