After AMD deal, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says more infrastructure deals are on the way

Around the same time that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang expressed surprise over OpenAI’s partnership with rival AMD, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said more such deals were in the pipeline.

During CNBC’s Squawk Box, Huang was asked if he was aware of AMD’s deal with OpenAI. He said he was “not really” aware and was surprised that AMD cleverly gave away 10 per cent of its stock to OpenAI in exchange for the ChatGPT maker’s help to develop the next generation of AI GPUs.

In case you are wondering, NVIDIA’s deal with OpenAI is the opposite of AMD’s. The world’s most valuable company has invested in the Sam Altman-led AI startup, meaning it is now a shareholder in OpenAI. And while OpenAI has been using NVIDIA’s hardware for years now, Huang said the deal means it will be the first time the chipmaker will be directly selling its products to OpenAI.

He explained that selling products directly to OpenAI is part of a broader plan to help the company eventually become a “self-hosted hyperscaler”, essentially meaning it will own and operate its own data centres. But just as Huang was commenting on his deal with OpenAI on CNBC, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was giving an interview to Andreessen Horowitz in his a16z podcast.

When Horowitz asked about OpenAI’s recent deals, Altman said that they “should expect much more from us in the coming months. We have decided that it is time to go make a very aggressive infrastructure bet… and to make the bet at this scale, we kind of need the whole industry – or a big chunk of the industry – to support it.”

OpenAI’s revenue is nowhere near $1 trillion, but Altman says he believes that the investment will eventually pay off. “If you’re building the biggest data center in the history of humankind, the biggest infrastructure project in history, you’ve got to be open to doing something else”, he added