Meta to buy AMD AI chips in $100 bn deal with option for 10% stake

Facebook owner Meta Platforms will buy artificial intelligence chips from Advanced Micro Devices in a deal that will also give it the opportunity to buy up to a 10 per cent stake of the chip company.

Meta will buy AMD's latest chips, the MI450, to help power data centres. The 6-gigawatt agreement will see shipments supporting the first gigawatt deployment set to start during the second half of this year. The agreement could potentially be worth more than $ 100 billion.

Shares of AMD jumped more than 9 per cent before the market opened on Tuesday.

The companies said that AMD issued Meta a performance-based warrant for up to 160 million shares of its common stock at $ 0.01 a piece, structured to vest as long as certain milestones are achieved.

The first tranche vests with the initial 1-gigawatt of shipments, with additional tranches vesting as Meta's purchases scale to 6 gigawatts.

News of the AMD deal comes just days after Meta announced a long-term partnership where it will use millions of chips and other equipment from Nvidia for its artificial-intelligence data centres.

AMD is looking to keep pace with Nvidia in the AI craze that's widely viewed as the biggest tectonic shift in technology since Apple co-founder Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone.

NVIDIA carved out an early lead in tailoring its chipsets, known as graphics processing units, or GPUs, from use in powering video games to helping to train powerful AI systems, like the technology behind ChatGPT and image generators. Demand skyrocketed as more people began using AI chatbots. Tech companies scrambled for more chips to build and run them.

While the appetite for AI chips is still large, there are some concerns about how much companies like Meta are spending on AI and whether they can make back their huge investments through higher profits and productivity in the future.