AMD’s Instinct MI450 chips will be released next year. Oracle will deploy approximately 50,000 of them starting in the third quarter of 2026.
Oracle is thus expanding its own portfolio beyond existing investments in Nvidia hardware. However, those who opt for an AI stack with open standards will be able to benefit from the competition between AMD and Nvidia. Not only that, but the MI450 is expected to be released earlier than Nvidia’s Vera Rubin GPUs.
Existing Nvidia customers will not be able to simply abandon the ecosystem surrounding CUDA, the programming language and development platform for Nvidia equipment. AMD offers ROCm as an open-source alternative and has matured the technology, but CUDA-driven lock-in keeps Nvidia in the saddle. AI developers often simply have more knowledge of CUDA than other options.
Growing demand for AI capacity
According to Oracle and AMD, future AI models will require more capacity than current AI clusters can deliver. OpenAI, a partner of both Oracle and AMD, has also come to this conclusion. That is why 1 gigawatt of AMD chips will be released to provide OpenAI with AI capacity.
Timing and rollout
The first phase of the deal between Oracle and AMD will start in the third quarter of 2026 with the implementation of 50,000 MI450 processors. Further expansion is planned for 2027 and subsequent years. The “AI superclusters” will be powered by AMD Helios, a rackscale architecture that we described earlier this year during AMD’s Advancing AI event:
Read more: AMD’s bold claim: Nvidia has no moat
Bottomless pit?
The collaboration between Oracle and AMD is one of many deals between the major AI players. On paper, it involves billions in investments. In fact, money that Nvidia puts into OpenAI is shifting back to AMD, while parties such as Oracle, Amazon, and Microsoft are putting billions into Nvidia to secure new AI hardware.
All of this is explained today by the idea that there is an unceasing demand for AI capacity. However, the next step is for AI to actually generate money for businesses worldwide and legitimize these huge investments made by the largest companies on the globe. We are still waiting for that to happen.