OpenAI Just Committed $1 Trillion in Two Weeks. Where's the Money Coming From?

Imagine building six nuclear power plants' worth of computing infrastructure. Now imagine doing it twice in two weeks. Now imagine doing it with less than $20 billion in actual cash on hand while your company burns through $2.5 billion every six months.

Welcome to OpenAI's October.

On Monday, OpenAI and AMD announced a massive computing deal that sent AMD's stock soaring 36% in premarket trading. According to Reuters, OpenAI will deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD's Instinct graphics processing units over multiple years, beginning with a 1-gigawatt rollout in the second half of 2026. AMD expects the deal to generate tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue and more than $100 billion in new revenue over four years.

The structure is remarkable: AMD issued OpenAI a warrant for up to 160 million shares of AMD common stock—approximately 10% of the company—at one penny per share. The shares vest in tranches as OpenAI hits deployment milestones and as AMD's stock price reaches certain targets, with the final tranche unlocking when AMD hits $600 per share.

AMD CEO Lisa Su framed the partnership optimistically: "We are thrilled to partner with OpenAI to deliver AI compute at massive scale. This partnership brings the best of AMD and OpenAI together to create a true win-win enabling the world's most ambitious AI buildout and advancing the entire AI ecosystem."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman echoed the enthusiasm: "This partnership is a major step in building the compute capacity needed to realize AI's full potential. AMD's leadership in high-performance chips will enable us to accelerate progress and bring the benefits of advanced AI to everyone faster."

This announcement comes just two weeks after OpenAI inked a $100 billion equity-and-supply deal with Nvidia for 10 gigawatts of computing power, plus a $300 billion agreement with Oracle for data center space. As reported by CNBC, at an estimated $50 billion in construction costs per gigawatt, OpenAI has committed roughly $1 trillion in new buildout spending in just the past two weeks.

How does a company with $4.3 billion in revenue during the first half of 2025—while burning through $2.5 billion in cash—fund a trillion dollars in infrastructure commitments?

The internet had thoughts:

Indeed, the math presents some interesting questions. OpenAI has approximately $30 billion in non-contingent cash from its recent funding rounds, against commitments that appear to exceed $1 trillion when you tally up the Nvidia deal, the Oracle agreement, and now AMD. The company's $500 billion valuation assumes continued exponential growth, but current revenues sit at an estimated $13 billion annually.

The structure of these deals reveals a pattern. Nvidia invested $100 billion in OpenAI, which OpenAI then uses to buy Nvidia chips. Oracle provides data centers that require purchasing massive amounts of GPUs from—you guessed it—Nvidia. Now AMD joins the ecosystem, not with cash, but with equity warrants tied to chip purchases.

Wall Street analysts have begun using terms like "circular financing" and "revenue roundtripping"—phrases that evoke memories of telecom bubbles past. Nvidia invests in OpenAI. OpenAI pays Oracle for cloud services. Oracle buys GPUs from Nvidia. The money flows in a tightly wound circle among the same handful of companies building and powering AI infrastructure.

Stacy Rasgon, an analyst with Bernstein Research, noted that Nvidia's deals had a whiff of circular financing and were emblematic of bubble-like behavior. NewStreet Research estimated that for every $10 billion Nvidia invests in OpenAI, it will see $35 billion worth of GPU purchases—equal to about 27% of Nvidia's annual revenues last fiscal year.

If a significant share of these companies' revenues comes from transactions fueled by capital they themselves injected into the circuit, are these revenues sustainable once the cycle of investment and reinvestment slows?

For AMD, this deal represents both validation and opportunity. The company has trailed Nvidia in the AI accelerator market for years, and landing OpenAI as a flagship customer provides enormous credibility for its Instinct GPU roadmap. AMD's stock jumped $80 billion in market capitalization on the news.

But the deal also highlights the industry's appetite for computing power that far exceeds what any single vendor can supply. Sam Altman has reportedly floated expectations of reaching 250 gigawatts of compute by 2033. For context, that's more electricity than entire nations consume.

OpenAI President Greg Brockman told CNBC the urgency is real: "We have to do this. This is so core to our mission if we really want to be able to scale to reach all of humanity, this is what we have to do." He added that the company is already unable to launch many ChatGPT features that could generate revenue because of insufficient compute power.

The AI boom has created an ecosystem where the world's most valuable companies are simultaneously suppliers, customers, investors, and competitors to each other. It's produced extraordinary valuations and even more extraordinary spending commitments.

The question isn't whether AI will transform computing—it clearly will. The question is whether trillion-dollar infrastructure bets made today will still make sense when the music stops and someone has to explain where all the money went.