Billionaire Lisa Su’s AMD to invest $1 billion in Meta

Advanced Micro Devices Inc., the chipmaker led by American billionaire Lisa Su, will invest $1 billion in Meta Platforms Inc. as the two companies expand a partnership to supply the computing power behind Meta’s artificial intelligence models.

AMD said on Oct. 27 that the money will go into Meta’s roughly $37.5 billion equity offering. It also said its first Helios rack-scale systems, which pack 72 of its Instinct graphics processors into a single server rack, are installed at Meta and being tested ahead of a wider rollout “in the near future.” AMD did not say how many shares it will receive or when it will buy them.

“With Helios now running at Meta, we are taking that partnership to a new scale in the superintelligence era,” said Su, AMD’s chair and chief executive officer.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and chief executive officer, said: “AMD has been a key partner in building out the compute that’s running our frontier models.”

Meta’s record stock sale

Meta launched the offering on Oct. 26 to help pay for its AI build-out. It raised the common stock portion to $25 billion from $22.5 billion and priced the shares at $625 each, alongside about $12.5 billion of mandatory convertible preferred stock. Both offerings were due to close on Oct. 29. The common shares were sold through forward agreements, so Meta will receive the cash when it settles them, no later than Nov. 19, 2027.

Meta also plans a separate $60 billion at-the-market share sale program in 2027. The company expects to spend $135 billion to $145 billion on capital projects this year as it adds computing capacity for its AI products.

Nvidia Corp., AMD’s larger rival, has proposed buying $3 billion of Meta stock. Before the sale, Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom Inc. had told Meta they were interested in buying up to $5 billion of shares between them, on the same terms as other investors.

The $1 billion is a sizable outlay for AMD, equal to about 7.6% of the $13.1 billion in cash and short-term investments it held at the end of June.

A two-way deal

The investment adds to a link that already runs in the other direction. In February, AMD agreed to supply Meta with up to 6 gigawatts of Instinct GPUs and gave Meta a warrant to buy up to 160 million AMD shares at a penny each. The warrant vests in stages as AMD ships chips, starting with the first gigawatt, and the final stage requires AMD’s stock to reach $600. Meta is committed only to the first gigawatt, and the warrant expires in February 2031. AMD gave OpenAI a similar warrant for up to 160 million shares last year.

Meta already runs millions of AMD’s EPYC server processors, which also power its new Muse personal AI agent.

AMD’s shares have more than doubled this year. The stock closed at $560.26 on Oct. 27, the day of the announcement, giving the company a market value of about $914.6 billion. AMD reports third-quarter results on Nov. 3, when investors will look for updates on chip shipments to Meta.

Su’s fortune

Su, 56, was born in Tainan, Taiwan, and moved to the United States as a child. She earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked at IBM and Freescale Semiconductor before joining AMD in 2012. She became chief executive in 2014, when the company was struggling, and added the role of chair in 2022.

Her fortune comes almost entirely from AMD stock built up through pay packages. After selling 95,000 shares for about $48 million under a pre-arranged trading plan in September, she held about 3.7 million AMD shares directly and through family trusts, a stake worth more than $2 billion at current prices.