Investor Brad Gerstner has warned that OpenAI’s blockbuster chip partnerships with Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) remain, for now, little more than headline-grabbing announcements rather than tangible hardware deployments.
His comments add a note of skepticism to what has been hailed as one of the most consequential moves in the artificial intelligence industry this year.
“Now we will see what gets delivered,” said Gerstner, founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital, in an interview with CNBC on Monday. “Ultimately, the best chips will win.”
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Gerstner’s remarks come on the heels of OpenAI’s sweeping deal with AMD that could see Sam Altman’s company take up to a 10% ownership stake in the chipmaker, while securing a multiyear supply of GPUs worth tens of billions of dollars. The deal marks one of the most significant GPU supply and equity partnerships ever seen in the AI sector — and a direct challenge to Nvidia’s dominance in the global AI hardware market.
The AMD alliance follows OpenAI’s deepening collaboration with Nvidia, whose graphics processors remain central to the training and deployment of advanced AI models. Together, these deals signal OpenAI’s growing ambitions to cement control over the computing power that fuels generative AI.
But for some investors, including Gerstner, the question is whether these announcements can translate into actual production.
“The deals provide more evidence that the world will remain compute-constrained despite best efforts to bring massive supply online,” he said, noting that the global scramble for GPUs is likely to persist well into the decade.
The surge in competition for AI hardware has made computing power a key frontier in both industry and geopolitics. Analysts say the OpenAI–AMD deal underscores the AI arms race now at the center of the U.S.-China technological rivalry. Washington has been encouraging an increase in domestic chip production to boost the U.S.’ AI innovation, while Beijing has intensified efforts to build its own semiconductor supply chain amid U.S. sanctions.
One of China’s leading AI firms, DeepSeek, has quickly emerged as a formidable rival. The company shocked the global AI community last year when it claimed to have developed a low-cost model capable of rivaling OpenAI’s GPT. DeepSeek has since continued its aggressive push, releasing open-source models powered by domestically produced chips — a move seen as a direct response to U.S. sanctions.
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s growing influence and for-profit expansion have reignited debate over the company’s original mission. Founded as a nonprofit research lab in 2015 with Elon Musk as one of its earliest cofounders and backers, OpenAI was initially created to ensure that artificial intelligence benefited humanity as a whole. But the company’s subsequent restructuring into a “capped-profit” model — and now its billion-dollar equity and hardware deals — have led many to question whether it still operates within that spirit.
Musk, who left OpenAI’s board in 2018 following a dispute over its direction, has become one of the company’s fiercest critics. He has repeatedly accused OpenAI of abandoning its open-source and nonprofit roots, claiming it has become too closely tied to commercial interests and corporate partners like Microsoft. Ironically, Musk has also praised recent efforts by the company to expand its AI infrastructure, calling its AMD deal a “smart move” that could redefine competition in the AI industry.
Altman has defended OpenAI’s hybrid structure, arguing that it allows the organization to raise the capital necessary for large-scale AI development while maintaining a mission-driven cap on profits. Still, as its valuation soars and its influence deepens, critics warn that the company risks drifting away from the public-interest ethos it was founded on.
Amid these tensions, OpenAI President Greg Brockman said the company’s partnerships are about scaling responsibly and ensuring access to compute for the entire ecosystem.
“What we’re really seeing is a world where there’s going to be absolute compute scarcity because there’s going to be so much demand for AI services, not just from OpenAI but from the entire ecosystem,” Brockman told CNBC’s Squawk on the Street Monday. “That’s why it’s so important for this whole industry to come together.”
OpenAI’s evolution has created diverse questions about its future. For investors like Gerstner, however, the key question remains whether these ambitious announcements can evolve into real-world deployments. And for critics like Musk, the broader question is whether OpenAI’s pursuit of profit and dominance can coexist with its founding promise to advance artificial intelligence for the public good.