𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 $𝐀𝐌𝐃?
Many people could be thinking: 𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝑨𝒃𝒐𝒖𝒕 $𝑨𝑴𝑫?
Well, although they weren’t mentioned in the official announcement of Project Stargate, there are indications that AMD is involved.
Microsoft
$MSFT, OpenAI, Oracle
$ORCL, MGX, and SoftBank
$SFTBY are part of the investor group behind Stargate, a cutting-edge AI data center confirmed to begin operations in mid-2024. The project is backed by over $100 billion in combined funding from this group.
In mid-2024, The Next Platform reported that Stargate would likely rely on Cobalt Armserver processors and Maia XPUs, with Ethernet scaling to support hundreds of thousands—or even over a million—XPUs in a single system.
While
$AMD wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the announcement, Forrest Norrod, AMD’s EVP and GM of the Datacenter Solutions Group, provided intriguing hints about their possible involvement.
In an interview with The Next Platform, he was asked about the scale of deployments being discussed for AMD’s upcoming Instinct MI500 GPU accelerator.
Specifically, he was asked if someone had come to AMD and said, “With MI500, I need 1.2 million GPUs or whatever.”
Norrod responded, “It’s in that range? Yes.” When pressed for more details, he added, “I am dead serious, it is in that range,” and clarified, “I’m talking about one machine… The scale of what’s being contemplated is mind-blowing.”
He also stated, “There are public reports of very sober people contemplating spending tens of billions of dollars or even a hundred billion dollars on training clusters.”
With $AMD’s cutting-edge hardware, including its MI accelerators, it’s hard to ignore the likelihood of their involvement in Stargate. Though not officially named, their role may still be integral to the project’s unprecedented scale and ambition.
Announcing The Stargate Project
The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States. We will begin deploying $100 billion immediately. This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world. This project will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.
The initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility. Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.
Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI are the key initial technology partners. The buildout is currently underway, starting in Texas, and we are evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as we finalize definitive agreements.
As part of Stargate, Oracle, NVIDIA, and OpenAI will closely collaborate to build and operate this computing system. This builds on a deep collaboration between OpenAI and NVIDIA going back to 2016 and a newer partnership between OpenAI and Oracle.
This also builds on the existing OpenAI partnership with Microsoft. OpenAI will continue to increase its consumption of Azure as OpenAI continues its work with Microsoft with this additional compute to train leading models and deliver great products and services.
All of us look forward to continuing to build and develop AI—and in particular AGI—for the benefit of all of humanity. We believe that this new step is critical on the path, and will enable creative people to figure out how to use AI to elevate humanity.