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These Billionaires Have Gotten $450 Billion Richer From Striking AI Infrastructure Deals For Their Own Firms
It’s been a big year for AI infrastructure deals. In just the last month, OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, AMD and others have announced epic transactions worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The deals are complex, unconventional—and often circular: Nvidia’s up to $100 billion investment in OpenAI, announced late last month, for instance, will allow OpenAI to purchase Nvidia GPUs to build out its own data center capacity. In a similar deal that flips who gets equity, AMD and OpenAI announced their own strategic partnership on Monday in which OpenAI got a warrant for up to 160 million shares of AMD common stock, or 10% of AMD’s shares, that vests in tranches based on OpenAI using 6 gigawatts of AMDs GPUs over a period of time.
Behind this spate of deals is something of a stampede mentality. “The world needs much more compute,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X announcing the AMD deal. Altman has been trumpeting that “more compute is more important now than ever before to succeed at our mission” for years.
“There's so much impatience and desire to move quickly and fear of getting left behind that there’s a very high premium on getting the most you can the fastest,” says Stella Biderman, executive director of AI nonprofit EleutherAI, which trained an open-source version of GPT-3 on CoreWeave GPUs. “The primary demand for GPUs is coming from a small number of very, very well-resourced organizations that put a very high premium on speed and on having the latest and greatest thing.”
And that’s leading them to make these scratch-my-back deals that are literally set up to help them help one another. Thanks in large part to the big deals, valuations are skyrocketing, and the billionaire founders, executives and investors tied to the massive AI data center buildout have benefited the most. By Forbes’ count, 20 of the most notable billionaires tied to the explosive growth in AI infrastructure spending have already added more than $450 billion to their fortunes since January 1.
Oracle cofounder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison is the biggest winner, © Forbes
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