AMD just landed a huge win in its ongoing battle to catch up with AI giant Nvidia.
On Tuesday, AMD and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced a multi-year, multi-generation partnership to scale Meta’s AI infrastructure and speed up the development of its advanced AI models.
Under the deal, Meta plans to deploy up to 6 gigawatts worth of AMD GPUs. For context, that’s enough to power nearly 4.5 million homes.
The first shipments supporting an initial one-gigawatt deployment are scheduled to begin in the second half of 2026 and will include custom chips optimized specifically for Meta’s workloads. The announcement also says that Meta will be a top customer of AMD’s 6th Gen AMD EPYC CPUs.
The agreement includes performance-based terms that could allow Meta to acquire up to 160 million AMD shares, about 10% of the company, if certain milestones are met. The first tranche vests once the initial gigawatt of chips ships, with additional vesting tied to additional chip shipments and AMD stock price thresholds.
AMD shares jumped about 10% Tuesday morning following the announcement.
AMD is quickly emerging as a viable alternative to Nvidia’s hardware. The company signed another major AI infrastructure partnership with OpenAI in October to deploy another 6 gigawatts of AI chips.
“We are proud to expand our strategic partnership with Meta as they push the boundaries of AI at unprecedented scale,” said AMD CEO Lisa Su in a press release today.
She added that this latest partnership would place the company “at the center of the global AI buildout.”
For Meta, the deal comes as it’s running its own AI arms race against companies like Google and OpenAI in pursuit of more powerful AI systems and ultimately the holy grail of artificial general intelligence.
Building those systems requires staggering amounts of compute. Nvidia remains the industry’s leading supplier of AI chips, controlling an estimated 84% of the AI and data center market share. This has led it to become the world’s most valuable company, with a market capitalization of about $4.6 trillion.
But by working with competitors like AMD, tech giants hope to avoid dependence on a single vendor.
“We’re excited to form a long-term partnership with AMD to deploy efficient inference compute and deliver personal superintelligence,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a press release. “This is an important step for Meta as we diversify our compute.”
The AMD agreement comes just days after Meta announced a separate long-term deal with Nvidia, though that announcement did not disclose how much power capacity it would support.
