This deal is simply the most recent in a string of information 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 info heart gold rush hinges partly on the concept fashions will enhance according to the legal guidelines of scaling—as long as they’re educated 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 guess that most of the US AI firms are making.”
Derek Thompson, a outstanding 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 providers from US customers stands at nearly $12 billion a yr, according to one study.
OpenAI had a strategic relationship with AMD previous to at this time’s announcement. At AMD’s Advancing AI occasion in Silicon Valley in June, Altman briefly joined AMD CEO Lisa Su on stage. Su stated that AMD has been getting suggestions from clients for a number of years as the corporate has been designing the upcoming MI400 sequence 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 by way of 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 pal” 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 extra remark AMD.