Keeping up with all the megabucks deals going on right now in AI land is pretty much a full-time job. But for what it's worth, here's another doozy that involves silly amounts of money and a whiff of just the sort of cannibalistic circularity that makes the whole situation so unnerving. AMD and Meta have announced a new strategic alliance in which Meta buys $60 billion worth of AMD GPUs, but also might end up owning 10% of AMD into the bargain, a stake currently valued at around $35 billion.
So, yeah, that's seemingly $60 billion being paid out by Meta, only to effectively get $35 billion back, along with a whole hill of GPUs for making AI slop. First up, however, it's worth noting that those dollar figures are estimates. The $60 billion is a Reuters estimate of the cost of what the official announcement explicitly mentions, namely 6 gigawatts worth of AMD Instinct GPUs for AI processing over a five-year period.
