Has AMD Really Caught Up With Nvidia? OpenAI’s Mega Deal Reveals a Shift in the AI Race

Liang-rong Chen

Hello everyone,

After signing a series of lightning-fast supply deals with Nvidia, Oracle, CoreWeave, and most recently AMD, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has now secured more than 20 gigawatts of computing capacity—the equivalent of the power output from ten retired nuclear reactors in Taiwan. That’s how much electricity OpenAI’s future data centers, whether built or leased, will need to operate.

This brought me back to two years ago, when my colleague Silva Shih（史書華） and I had an exclusive interview with Altman during his visit to Taiwan.

At the time, his favorite topic wasn’t AI—it was nuclear power, particularly his personal investment in Helion Energy, a nuclear fusion startup developing “artificial sun” technology. The company aims to bring fusion energy online by 2028(construction is already underway).

Back then, I assumed Altman’s nuclear dream was about making AI compute cheap enough for everyone—a way to democratize access to intelligence.

Only now do I realize he may already have antici…