OpenAI Expands Billion-Dollar AI Deals as Altman Promises More to Come
After securing massive partnerships with Nvidia, AMD, and Oracle, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hints that even bigger deals are on the horizon.
Just days after Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang expressed surprise over OpenAI’s multibillion-dollar partnership with AMD, Sam Altman revealed that the AI giant isn’t done yet. In an interview with Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z Podcast, Altman said OpenAI will announce “much more” in the coming months, signaling a new wave of large-scale infrastructure collaborations.
OpenAI’s strategy, which already involves over $1 trillion in commitments across partnerships with AMD, Nvidia, Oracle, SoftBank, and others, focuses on building data centers powerful enough to train and deploy the next generation of AI models. These deals allow OpenAI to access massive computing resources—often with partners providing both hardware and capital—without bearing the full upfront cost.
In one unusual arrangement, AMD granted OpenAI up to 10% of its stock over time, in exchange for OpenAI using and helping develop AMD’s next-gen AI GPUs. Nvidia’s deal runs in the opposite direction—investing directly into OpenAI. Altman said this complex web of agreements is part of a larger plan to “make a very aggressive infrastructure bet” as OpenAI positions itself to eventually become a self-hosted hyperscaler.
However, building that infrastructure doesn’t come cheap. Nvidia’s Huang estimated that each gigawatt of AI data center capacity could cost between $50 billion and $60 billion. OpenAI’s Stargate project alone accounts for 10 gigawatts of U.S. facilities worth $500 billion, alongside other massive partnerships in the U.K. and Europe.
Despite OpenAI’s rapid revenue growth—reportedly hitting $4.5 billion in the first half of 2025—the company’s trillion-dollar ambitions are still far beyond its current income. Altman acknowledged this challenge but remains confident: “I’ve never been more confident in the research roadmap in front of us and the economic value that will come from using those future models.”
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Altman’s bold expansion shows how today’s AI race is shifting from algorithms to infrastructure. For Africa’s growing tech ecosystem, this highlights the importance of data center investments, AI hardware partnerships, and regional cloud infrastructure—areas where African innovators and policymakers can prepare to plug into the global AI economy.
Source: TechCrunch (Julie Bort, Oct 8, 2025)