After AMD and OpenAI announced an expanded partnership on Monday , the chatter immediately turned to the unusual way OpenAI would pay for its AMD purchases. It will use AMD’s own stock to do so.
To recap: OpenAI has agreed to help AMD refine its line of Nvidia competitor chips, the Instinct GPUs, as well as to purchase and deploy 6 gigawatts of compute capacity from AMD over multiple years. AMD said this deal is worth billions in revenue.
But OpenAI isn’t paying for this out of its own revenues. Instead AMD has granted OpenAI a boatload of stock warrants — up to 160 million AMD shares — which will vest in tranches as certain milestones are achieved. Those milestones include specific increases in the stock price, with the last tranche dependent on AMD shares soaring to $600 million