AMD stock skyrocketed more than 30% on Monday following the news.
OpenAI will deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD’s Instinct graphics processing units over multiple years and across multiple generations of hardware, the companies said Monday. It will kick off with an initial 1-gigawatt rollout of chips in the second half of 2026.
“We have to do this,” OpenAI President Greg Brockman told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “This is so core to our mission if we really want to be able to scale to reach all of humanity, this is what we have to do.”
Brockman added that the company is already unable to launch many features in ChatGPT and other products that could generate revenue because of the lack of compute power.
As part of the tie-up, AMD has issued OpenAI a warrant for up to 160 million shares of AMD common stock, with vesting milestones tied to both deployment volume and AMD’s share price.
The first tranche vests with the first full gigawatt deployment, with additional tranches unlocking as OpenAI scales to 6 gigawatts and meets key technical and commercial milestones required for large-scale rollout.
If OpenAI exercises the full warrant, it could acquire approximately 10% ownership in AMD, based on the current number of shares outstanding.
The ChatGPT maker said the deal was worth billions, but declined to disclose a specific dollar amount.
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AMD one-day stock chart.
The deal positions AMD as a core strategic partner to OpenAI, marking one of the largest GPU deployment agreements in the artificial intelligence industry to date.
AMD CEO Lisa Su told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” that AI is on a 10-year growth path, and “at the end of the day, you need the foundational compute to do that.”
“You need partnerships like this that really bring the ecosystem together to ensure that, you know, we can really get the best technologies, you know, out there,” she said. “So we’re super excited about the opportunities here.”
The partnership could help ease industrywide pressure on supply chains and reduce OpenAI’s reliance on a single vendor.
OpenAI unveiled a landmark $100 billion equity-and-supply agreement with Nvidia nearly two weeks ago, cementing the chip giant’s role in powering the next generation of OpenAI models. That arrangement combined capital investment with long-term hardware supply — though in Nvidia’s case, it was the chipmaker taking an ownership stake in OpenAI.
Shares of Nvidia fell 1% on Monday following news of the OpenAI-AMD deal.
That deal accounts for a dedicated 10-gigawatt portion of OpenAI’s broader 23-gigawatt infrastructure road map. At an estimated $50 billion in construction costs per gigawatt — together with the AMD deal — OpenAI has committed roughly $1 trillion in new buildout spending in just the past two weeks.
OpenAI is also in talks with Broadcom to build custom chips for its next generation of models.
The arrangement between OpenAI and AMD adds a new layer to the increasingly circular nature of AI’s corporate economy, where capital, equity and compute are traded among the same handful of companies building and powering the technology.
Nvidia is supplying the capital to buy its chips. Oracle is helping build the sites. AMD and Broadcom are stepping in as suppliers. OpenAI is anchoring the demand.
It’s a tightly wound circular economy, and one that analysts fear could face real strain if any link in the chain starts to weaken.
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For AMD, the partnership is both a commercial milestone and a validation of its next-generation Instinct road map.
After years of trailing Nvidia in the AI accelerator market, AMD now has a flagship customer at the forefront of the generative AI boom.
Su said it creates “a true win-win enabling the world’s most ambitious AI buildout and advancing the entire AI ecosystem.”
It also reinforces OpenAI’s broader infrastructure ambitions.
Through its Stargate project, CEO Altman’s startup is rapidly transforming into one of the most aggressive infrastructure builders in the AI sector. Its first site in Abilene, Texas, is already operational and running Nvidia chips, with construction continuing to expand capacity.
The AppLovin logo arranged on a smartphone in New York, US, on Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2025.
Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images
AppLovin shares plummeted on Monday after Bloomberg reported that the SEC has been probing the mobile advertising company over its data-collection practices.
The agency has been looking into whether the company violated agreements on pushing targeted ads to consumers, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The report said that the SEC is responding to a whistleblower complained filed this year along with multiple short-seller reports, and added that neither the company nor its officials have been accused of wrongdoing.
An AppLovin spokesperson said the company doesn’t typically comment on the “existence or non-existence” of regulatory matters.
“That said, as a global public company, we regularly engage with regulators and if we get inquiries we address them in the ordinary course,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Material developments, if any, would be disclosed through the appropriate public channels.”
The stock dropped 14% in regular trading after the report, which landed shortly before market close. It fell another 5% in extended trading.
AppLovin’s stock has been on a tear, jumping about 80% this year after soaring more than 700% in 2024. The surge has been driven by the company’s artificial intelligence technology that’s allowed it to provide better ad targeting capabilities to brands.
Last month, AppLovin was added to the S&P 500, replacing MarketAxess Holdings, at the same time that Robinhood joined the index in place of Caesars Entertainment.
AppLovin made the move into the benchmark despite a short-seller’s effort to keep it out.
In March, Fuzzy Panda Research advised the committee for the large-cap U.S. index to keep AppLovin from becoming a constituent. AppLovin shares dropped 15% in December, when the committee picked Workday to join the S&P 500.
Three notable short-seller firms, including Fuzzy Panda, have slammed AppLovin of late. The latest was Muddy Waters Research, which in March said the company’s ad tactics “systematically” violate app stores’ terms of service by “impermissibly extracting proprietary IDs from Meta, Snap, TikTok, Reddit, Google, and others.” In so doing, AppLovin is funneling targeted ads to users without their consent, Muddy Waters said.
Fuzzy Panda and Culper Research put out reports the prior month, taking aim at AppLovin’s AXON software, which drove its earnings growth and stock surge. The shares dropped 12% on Feb. 26, the day of the short reports.
After those reports were published, AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi wrote a blog post, defending his company’s technology and practices, and taking aim at the short sellers trying to profit from AppLovin’s decline.
Figma signage appears at the New York Stock Exchange in New York as the company prepares for its shares to begin trading on July 31, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Figma shares jumped 7% on Monday after the design software vendor’s technology was promoted by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in an onstage demo at his company’s annual DevDay conference in San Francisco.
Altman discussed Figma’s integration into ChatGPT, which has more than 800 million monthly users. He showed how third-party applications could plug in with OpenAI’s Apps SDK, or software development framework.
“When someone’s using ChatGPT, you’ll be able to find an app by asking for it by name,” Altman said. “For example, you could sketch out a product flow for ChatGPT and then say, Figma, turn this sketch into a workable diagram. The Figma app will take over respond and complete the action.”
In addition to asking for Figma’s help by name in ChatGPT, the assistant can also suggest Figma when it’s relevant, Figma product manager Luke Zhang said in a blog post.
The rally for Figma, at its high point, was the steepest since the day of the company’s public market debut on the New York Stock Exchange in July.
Figma has been ramping up its own tools for working on app and website designs using generative AI models from OpenAI and other providers.
Subscribers to products that connect to the Apps SDK will be able to log in without leaving their ChatGPT conversations, Altman said. He said people working on products in Figma can also launch the FigJam tool to keep working on development ideas. Apps SDK is based on the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that OpenAI rival Anthropic introduced last year.
Software developers will be able to submit apps for review later in 2025, Altman said.
Over time, OpenAI will offer many ways to generate revenue through third-party integrations, Altman said. Last week, OpenAI announced a feature allowing people to buy products listed on Etsy through ChatGPT.
Instagram announced on Monday the launch of a new “Rings” award that will give 25 creators a literal gold ring and a matching badge on their profile, but no cash.
Winners will be chosen by a panel including Instagram chief Adam Mosseri, filmmaker Spike Lee, designer Marc Jacobs and YouTuber Marques Brownlee.
The move comes as Meta-owned Instagram has wound down its creator bonus program and brand deals are slowing across the industry, raising the question of why one of the world’s richest companies is offering jewelry and profile features instead of direct payouts.
“It’s more about a special visibility and sort of incentive for people to work towards a really cool elevated recognition,” Brownlee told CNBC.
He said he nominated creators whose work showed the most effort and risk-taking, not simply those with the biggest followings.
Winners can also change their profile backdrop color and customize the “like” button.
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Meta ended its Reels Play bonus program, which was a key source of income for many creators, on Instagram and Facebook in 2023. At the time, some vented online that losing the payments left them struggling.
“As stupid as it sounds, in this economy it was a blessing for my household to have the extra money coming in,” wrote a user on Reddit.
Mosseri said in June 2024 that the company is considering changes to creator compensation, but no new plan has been announced.
Rivals YouTube and TikTok have their own creator revenue share programs.
YouTube paid out over $100 billion to creators over the last four years, the company reported in September.
Creators saw a dramatic drop in brand deals in 2024, falling 52%, according to a survey from Kajabi.
In January, Meta was offering deals to creators to promote Instagram on TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube, CNBC reported. However, an Instagram spokesperson said these deals had ended.
Against that backdrop, Instagram’s new gold rings stand out as a symbolic gesture rather than direct financial support in an increasingly challenging creator economy.
“This could be looked at as an incentive to make more Instagram stuff, or really just an incentive to make the best possible thing you can and hopefully get recognized for it,” Brownlee said. “No matter where you’re doing it, it feels good to know that it resonates with people, this is inspiring people, or this is impressing people.”