Robbie Whelan

When you're developing an AI model or an AI tool, whatever it is, be it a chatbot or a video generation app, you have to first train it,

And then you have to make it capable of responding to queries, which is to say you have to run it.

And the running it is usually referred to as inference, inference computing.

Inference is when you or I sit down and says, hey, chat GPT, what should I eat for lunch today?

And spits out a few recipes for us.

That is inference.

It's querying the models and it's running them.

And when this announcement was made, AMD's stock shot through the roof.

They saw huge gains in their share price, and everyone was very excited about it.

And basically, the reason why everyone was so excited was because here you had what most people regard as the best company in AI development, which is OpenAI.

Not jumping ship entirely from NVIDIA, but saying, look, AMD is just as good for us to operate our models.

So we can use their chips, we can pay them a tremendous amount of money to buy them.

And it's not just NVIDIA anymore.

They're not the only game in town.

The AMD OpenAI deal, it wasn't all sunshine and roses.

There were some concerns as well that came up, and they surrounded the financing of the deal.

And they sort of pointed to this idea of, is this really a wonderful deal for everyone involved?

Or does it maybe indicate that we might be in a huge, dangerous financial bubble surrounding AI?

Okay, well, without further ado, let's jump right in.

If you're wondering why it sounds like money's going out the door from AMD to a customer and then coming right back in the door to buy their chips, it's because this is an example of what people have recently started describing as circular funding or circular financing.