Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) shares surged after it announced a six gigawatt deal to power Meta Platforms’ next generation of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure across multiple generations of AMD Instinct graphics processing units (GPUs).
AMD said the agreement expanded on the two companies’ strategic partnership and aligned “roadmaps across silicon, systems and software to deliver AI platforms purpose-built for Meta’s workloads”.
The deal between AMD and the parent company of social media platforms, including Facebook, is worth up to US$60 billion (A$85 billion) over five years, according to this Reuters article.
It also allows Meta to invest in up to 10% of AMD’s shares.
AMD shares (NASDAQ: AMD) closed $17.24 (8.77%) higher at $213.84 on Tuesday (Wednesday), capitalising the company at $345.65 billion.
“We are proud to expand our strategic partnership with Meta as they push the boundaries of AI at unprecedented scale,” AMD Chair and Chief Executive Officer Lisa Su said in a media release.
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company was excited to form a long-term partnership with AMD to deploy efficient inference compute and deliver personal superintelligence.
“This is an important step for Meta as we diversify our compute. I expect AMD to be an important partner for many years to come,” he said in the same announcement.
AMD signed a similar deal last year with OpenAI, while Meta has separately struck a deal with Nvidia to buy millions of AI chips.
AMD is lagging rival Nvidia, now the world’s largest public company, which controls 90% if the AI chip market and has a market capitalisation 15 times larger.
One gigawatt is enough to power roughly 750,000 homes on average.
