The penny-warrant template

On February 24, Meta agreed to buy six gigawatts of AMD Instinct chips and granted AMD a warrant for up to 160 million shares — about a tenth of the company — at one cent each. Read the fine print and the numbers are uncanny: six gigawatts, 160 million shares, ten percent, penny exercise price. They are the exact terms OpenAI gave AMD in October 2025. AMD has taken a one-off deal and turned it into a standard product.

AMD has effectively turned 'give a giant customer ten percent of the company in penny warrants' into a repeatable financing product.

The headline reads like a defection from NVIDIA. It isn't. One week earlier, on February 17, Meta committed to millions of NVIDIA's newest GPUs — both purchases sit inside the same 2026 capital budget of $115 to $135 billion. Meta is buying from both chipmakers at once. The AMD deal is a hedge, not a switch, and the loser is not NVIDIA's crown but its exclusivity: the second-largest AI buyer now has a credible second supplier, and a seat at AMD's cap table to align the incentive.

Two details deserve the squint. The $100 billion is an 'up to' estimate from analysts and press, not a contracted line in AMD's filing. And the equity isn't a stake Meta bought — it's a warrant that only fully vests if AMD ships the chips and its stock more than triples to $600. AMD is paying for demand with shares it issues only if the demand pays off.

The quiet result: the two largest AI buyers now both own slices of the chipmaker they most depend on, bought with their own purchase orders. AMD has learned to finance the customer it needs by giving that customer a reason to want AMD's stock up — and the GPUs it sells are the thing that gets it there.