OpenAI has agreed to buy tens of bil­lions of dol­lars’ worth of chips from AMD as part of a deal that could see the Chat­GPT maker take a 10 per cent stake in the $270bn chip­maker over time.

The US-based arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence start-up said it had agreed to pur­chase pro­cessors with a total power con­sump­tion of 6 gigawatts — roughly equi­val­ent to Singa­pore’s aver­age demand — send­ing the US-based chip­maker’s shares as much as 30 per cent higher yes­ter­day.

The com­pan­ies did not put a total fig­ure on the trans­ac­tion, but OpenAI exec­ut­ives estim­ate that 1GW of capa­city costs about $50bn to bring online, with two-thirds of that spent on chips and the infra­struc­ture to sup­port them.

The deal comes just a fort­night after AMD rival Nvidia said that it planned to invest $100bn in OpenAI, with the two com­pan­ies pledging to deploy 10GW of new data centre capa­city.

AMD has also issued OpenAI a war­rant to pur­chase as many as 160mn shares at an exer­cise price of $0.01 over time based on AMD’s “achiev­ing cer­tain share price tar­gets” and OpenAI deploy­ing its chips. That would equate to about 10 per cent of the com­pany.