Even after Stargate, Oracle, Nvidia, and AMD, OpenAI has more big deals coming soon, Sam Altman says

Almost at the same time that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang expressed surprise over OpenAI’s multibillion-dollar deal with rival AMD — shortly after his company agreed to invest up to $100 billion in the AI ​​model maker — Sam Altman said more such deals are in the works.

Huang appeared CNBC’s Squawkbox on Wednesday. When asked if he was aware of the AMD deal before it was announced, he replied: “Not really.”

As TechCrunch previously reported, OpenAI’s deal with AMD is unusual. AMD has agreed to provide OpenAI with large tranches of AMD stock – up to 10% of the company over a period of years, depending on factors such as share price increases. In return, OpenAI will use and help develop the chipmaker’s next generation AI GPU chips. This makes OpenAI a shareholder of AMD.

Nvidia’s deal is the opposite. Nvidia has invested in the AI ​​modeling startup, making it a shareholder in OpenAI.

Although OpenAI has been using Nvidia equipment for years through cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure, Oracle OCI and CoreWeave, “this is the first time we are going to sell directly to them,” Huang explains. He added that his company would also continue to supply equipment to the cloud makers.

This direct sale, which includes AI equipment beyond GPUs such as systems and networking, is intended to “prepare” OpenAI for the day when it will be its own “self-hosted hyperscaler,” Huang said. In other words, when it uses its own data centers.

But Huang admits that OpenAI “doesn’t have the money yet” to pay for all this stuff. He estimated that each gigawatt of AI data center will cost OpenAI “$50 to $60 billion,” covering everything from the land and power to the servers and equipment.

So far, OpenAI has deployed 10 gigawatts of U.S. facilities by 2025 through its $500 billion Stargate deal with partners Oracle and SoftBank. (Plus, it signed a $300 billion cloud deal with Oracle.)

The collaboration with Nvidia involved at least 10 gigawatts of AI data centers. The partnership with AMD amounted to 6 gigawatts. In addition, the ‘Stargate UK’ partnership includes the expansion of data centers in Great Britain, and has other European commitments. By some estimates, OpenAI has this year $1 trillion worth of such deals.

As with the AMD deal, Nvidia’s deal has been criticized for being “circular.” Bloomberg reports this. The critics say Nvidia essentially underwrites OpenAI’s purchases and gets the AI ​​startup’s stock for its efforts.

Altman to the world: expect more

While Huang dissected OpenAI’s infrastructure needs on CNBC, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman interviewed with Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z podcast decreased.

During the podcast, Ben Horowitz, co-founder of a16z, told Altman that he is “very impressed with the improvement in deal structure,” referring to these most recent deals. Andreessen Horowitz is an OpenAI investor, so it would be shocking if he wasn’t impressed. OpenAI has found a way to potentially acquire billions of dollars worth of equipment on someone else’s dime. Repeatedly.

When asked about these recent deals, Altman said, “You should expect a lot more from us in the coming months.”

Altman sees OpenAI’s future models and other products to come as so much more capable, creating so much more demand, that “we’ve decided it’s time to make a very aggressive infrastructure bet,” he explained.

The problem is that OpenAI’s revenue today is nowhere near a trillion dollars, although it is growing rapidly by all accounts. reportedly worth $4.5 billion in the first half of 2025.

Yet Altman clearly believes that all these investments will eventually pay for themselves. “I have never been more confident in the research roadmap before us and also in the economic value that will come from the use of this [future] models.”

But, he said, OpenAI can’t achieve all that economic opulence on its own.

“To make a bet on this scale, we actually need the entire industry, or a large portion of the industry, to support this. And this goes from the electron level to the model distribution and everything in between, which is a lot. So we’re going to be working with a lot of people,” Altman said, with more deals expected in the coming months.

So stand by, tech industry. OpenAI is still running and trading.