OpenAI could take up to a 10% stake in AMD

Andrew NuscaBy Andrew NuscaEditorial Director, Brainstorm and author of Fortune Tech
Andrew NuscaEditorial Director, Brainstorm and author of Fortune Tech

Andrew Nusca is the editorial director of Brainstorm, Fortune's innovation-obsessed community and event series. He also authors Fortune Tech, Fortune’s flagship tech newsletter.

AMD CEO Lisa Su in Taipei on June 3, 2024. (Photo: I-Hwa Cheng/AFP/Getty Images)
AMD CEO Lisa Su in Taipei on June 3, 2024.
I-Hwa Cheng/AFP/Getty Images

Good morning. I’m finally processing what happened at this year’s Fortune Brainstorm Tech before my hasty mid-event exit. (It was very cinematic: “To the airport! My wife is in labor!” Et cetera.)

Can I just say? It was a damn good Brainstorm. DoorDash CEO Tony Xu returned as the head of a Fortune 500 company. Autodesk CMO Dara Treseder brought the heat about what tech is doing to marketing. Wyclef Jean freestyled. Neuralink patient Noland Arbaugh wowed. Greycroft’s Dana Settle pulled no punches about startup valuations. Michael Ovitz captivated with Scorsese stories. And on and on.

If you missed it, you can watch all mainstage sessions here

But allow me to make an even better suggestion: Register for Fortune Brainstorm Tech 2026, in Aspen this June. It’ll be our 25th anniversary (!) and you’ll want to see IRL what we’ve got planned. —Andrew Nusca

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OpenAI could take up to a 10% stake in AMD

AMD CEO Lisa Su in Taipei on June 3, 2024. (Photo: I-Hwa Cheng/AFP/Getty Images)
AMD CEO Lisa Su in Taipei on June 3, 2024.
I-Hwa Cheng/AFP/Getty Images

Talk about starting the week off with a bang.

The extraordinarily well-funded AI startup OpenAI has announced a deal—pardon, a “six gigawatt agreement”—with Silicon Valley chipmaker AMD that would allow the younger company access to scores of GPUs and up to a 10% stake in the chipmaker. 

AMD shares jumped 28% on the news, settling around $206.

Those 160 million AMD common shares won’t come all at once. They’re structured to vest according to “specific milestones,” including share price targets, the chipmaker says. 

The first stock tranche comes with an initial 1-gigawatt deployment of AMD’s Instinct MI450 GPUs planned for the second half of 2026.

If you’re reading this and thinking that OpenAI is choosing against AI chip leader Nvidia by partnering with rival AMD, think again. It was just two weeks ago that the company announced a 10-gigawatt deal with Nvidia, once again with an initial deployment scheduled for H2 2026. 

Why all the dealmaking? The Stargate project with Microsoft, Oracle, and Softbank certainly plays a part. But if you ask me, it’s good old-fashioned Silicon Valley blitzscaling. —AN

Qualtrics to acquire Press Ganey Forsta for $6.75 billion

Qualtrics is about to make its largest acquisition ever.

The experience management—don’t call it a survey!—company founded by Ryan Smith and led by Zig Serafin will plunk down almost seven yards, as the traders say, for Press Ganey Forsta.

Who? PGF, founded in 1985 and based in Indiana, specializes in health care patient satisfaction surveys (sorry, “experience measurement”). The company is itself the product of several mergers of smaller CX, or customer experience, firms; like Qualtrics, it went private after previously trading in the public markets.

Picking up PGF would give Qualtrics a boatload of data, a fair amount of category expertise, and—according to Press Ganey literature—more large customers, including 50% of U.S. hospitals.

Qualtrics has been on a tear since Silver Lake and CPP pulled it from the market in 2023; Serafin, who’s led the company since 2020, has been building what it calls “the largest database of human sentiment in the world.”

As he told Fortune earlier this year: “I think the companies that use the data around understanding their customers ultimately understand the stories of their customers more effectively.” —AN

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