This deal is simply the most recent in a string of knowledge middle investments involving OpenAI and different tech corporations. Shortly after his inauguration in January, US president Donald Trump introduced that OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle would make investments $100 billion in constructing AI information facilities on US soil and would pour as much as $500 billion into AI infrastructure over time.
The info middle gold rush hinges partially on the concept that fashions will enhance according to the legal guidelines of scaling—as long as they’re educated on extra information and compute. “There’s this primary 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 information middle effectivity, informed WIRED in September, speaking about an OpenAI-Oracle deal to create three new information middle websites. “That is the guess that lots of the US AI corporations are making.”
Derek Thompson, a distinguished economics reporter, famous in a latest publish that the tech trade is projected to spend round $400 billion on AI infrastructure this yr—whereas demand for AI companies from US shoppers stands at nearly $12 billion a yr, in accordance with one examine.
OpenAI had a strategic relationship with AMD previous to at present’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 type of marquee clients.
Altman famous on stage that the trade’s transfer towards reasoning fashions has been placing stress 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 trade 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 extra remark AMD.