
Meta Platforms Inc will deploy 6 gigawatts’ worth of data center gear based on processors from Advanced Micro Devices Inc, a blockbuster deal that marks a win for the chipmaker’s attempts to catch up with Nvidia Corp.
Meta will buy AMD chips and computers designed to run artificial intelligence models over a five-year stretch, beginning in the second half of 2026. The series of transactions will be worth “double-digit billions” of dollars per gigawatt, according to AMD Chief Executive Officer Lisa Su, who declined to be more specific about the value of the transaction.
As part of the arrangement, Meta will receive warrants to buy 160 million AMD shares in stages, the two companies said. The shares will vest when the project and AMD’s stock price reach certain milestones, turning Meta into a major holder.
AMD’s shares rose 8.8 percent to $213.84 at the close in New York trading, their best one-day gain since November. Meta’s stock rose less than 1 percent.
The agreement is the latest step in a colossal spending spree by Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made AI the company’s top priority, pledging to devote hundreds of billions of dollars to “aggressively front-load” computing capacity.
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Last month, the executive announced a new initiative called Meta Compute that’s focused on building “tens of gigawatts this decade and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time” to secure a strategic advantage over competitors.
One gigawatt represents the output of a nuclear reactor — enough electricity to power roughly 700,000 homes.
On a conference call with analysts, AMD faced questions about why it was necessary to offer an equity stake to a customer. Analysts also asked whether the approach made the deal less attractive to existing shareholders. And they questioned whether Meta would have agreed to the purchase without the incentive — and whether other customers should expect similar terms.
AMD’s Su said that the agreement wasn’t a template for future deals. The transaction contributes significantly to AMD’s goal of rapidly expanding its data center business, she said. Meta only gets the shares when it completes the deployments and meets other technical goals, she said. The share price has to reach certain levels — as high as $600 — which means that other shareholders will have already enjoyed good returns.
“Without this strategic agreement, I think we would have done well,” she said. “But what we’re looking to do is do something transformational. And when you talk about gigawatt-scale deployments and 6 gigawatts over five years, that is transformational in terms of where we see our business.”
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The announcement signals that AMD is keeping pace with larger rival Nvidia, which disclosed its own tie-up with Meta last week. And it shows that broader spending on AI equipment continues to accelerate, even as some investors express fears of an investment bubble. The growing financial ties between suppliers and customers have only added to those worries.
For Meta, the AMD deal will bring components that are customized to its needs. It also will have the ability to influence how those semiconductors are designed going forward.
“Our ambitions are pretty high,” said Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s head of global infrastructure, who oversees the company’s data centers and their technical architecture. Meta plans to forge ahead with its own in-house custom AI chip efforts and will continue to purchase from Nvidia, with the chips being used to support different workloads.
“At the scale we’re talking at, there’s a place for all three,” Janardhan said during an interview with reporters.
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Janardhan, who now reports directly to Zuckerberg, added that the company hasn’t yet decided which of its data centers will use the new chips delivered through this expanded partnership with AMD. The processors are expected to help with the inference stage of AI — the phase when trained models are put into use.
AMD’s Su said that Meta, which has already helped influence the design of AMD’s chips, will get custom versions of its forthcoming accelerator, the MI450, and successor products. That ability to define more closely what it needs was part of the reason for committing to AMD, Janardhan said.
“What we’re looking to do is go big and accelerate,” AMD’s Su said. “We were on a very good path with Meta, but this actually takes our relationship to the next level.”
Meta is already AMD’s second-largest customer, and will now be increasingly vital to the chipmaker’s growth. AMD reported $34.6 billion in sales last year and is on course to boost revenue by 34 percent this year, according to Wall Street estimates. The addition of even $10 billion of extra sales would accelerate its efforts to gain ground on Nvidia.
Even with the growth, AMD’s investors have become more skeptical of its prospects in recent weeks. They’re worried that AI highfliers won’t be able to expand fast enough to justify their valuations. After AMD shares surged 77 percent in 2025, they were down 8.2 percent this year through Monday.
The Meta tie-up assumes that AMD shares are just at the start of a longer rally. As Su noted, some of Meta’s warrants would only vest if the share price reaches $600.
