✦ The OpenAI Deal & the 6-Gigawatt OrderNarrow moat

The deal that reset AMD's ceiling was signed October 6, 2025: OpenAI will deploy 6 gigawatts of Instinct GPUs over multiple years and generations, starting with 1 gigawatt of MI450s in the second half of 2026, in a partnership AMD says should produce tens of billions of dollars of revenue¹. The novelty is the currency. AMD issued OpenAI a warrant for up to 160 million shares — roughly a tenth of the company — at a penny apiece, vesting in tranches as deployments scale from the first gigawatt to all six and as AMD's stock clears price milestones running to $600². If OpenAI takes the full position, it will have been paid in equity for making AMD's AI business real.

Skeptics call that circular, and the honest answer is: partly. AMD dilutes existing owners to buy scale; OpenAI gets upside in its own supplier; the revenue that justifies the shares comes from the buyer who received them. But the circularity has a stop condition built in — the warrant vests on deployment, not on announcement. Chips must be bought, racks energized, gigawatts drawn. That makes this the rare AI megadeal that grades itself. It is also no longer unique: in February 2026 AMD issued Meta an identical warrant for up to 160 million shares at $0.01, vesting on Instinct purchase milestones and share-price targets³, so two of the largest buyers of AI compute now hold options on AMD's own stock that pay out only if they buy its chips.

So grade it. The first tranche is dated — 1 gigawatt in H2 2026 — and the schedule from there is public enough that slippage will be visible in AMD's data-center line within quarters. Watch that first gigawatt, then the cadence toward six; and watch whether OpenAI's parallel commitments to Nvidia and Broadcom crowd AMD's share of its future workloads. Tens of billions is the promise. The data-center revenue line is the verdict.