AMD and Core Scientific announced a partnership on July 28, 2026 that gives AMD access to more than 500 megawatts of US data center capacity starting in 2027, with the ability to expand to as much as 2.5 gigawatts. The deal reflects a broader shift in how chipmakers are securing deployment capacity: rather than building data centers themselves, they’re locking in long-term leases with colocation specialists.
Regulatory filings show the initial phase covers roughly 529 megawatts of critical IT capacity across five Core Scientific facilities in Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Georgia, with AMD directly leasing 377 megawatts and an unnamed neocloud leasing the remaining 152 megawatts. Core Scientific management said on its Q2 earnings call that the AMD contracts alone could generate more than $14 billion in base revenue over the deal’s duration, according to Yahoo Finance’s coverage. AMD will also receive market-priced warrants to buy Core Scientific common stock, though the exercise price and share count weren’t disclosed.
What AMD is actually deploying
The facilities will host AMD’s Instinct GPUs, EPYC CPUs, and ROCm software, with the capacity earmarked for AMD’s own customers — cloud providers, AI model developers, and enterprises — rather than AMD’s internal compute needs. AMD’s Helios rack-scale reference architecture, which bundles compute, networking, power distribution, and cooling into a single design, is expected to anchor much of the deployment, though the companies haven’t confirmed Helios will specifically run at these sites.
Why Core Scientific, and why this shape of deal
Core Scientific has spent the past year pivoting away from bitcoin mining toward AI colocation, with its Q2 earnings showing colocation revenue of $136.7 million against just $21.5 million from legacy mining — a business mix that has essentially flipped in twelve months. For AMD, the arrangement adds a second major infrastructure channel to its existing partnership with Anthropic, which covers up to 2 gigawatts of Instinct MI450 GPUs, and its expanded deployment on Microsoft Azure — evidence that AMD is deliberately diversifying beyond hyperscaler relationships to secure places to actually run its chips.
The market’s mixed reaction
Core Scientific shares rose roughly 5-6% on the announcement, while AMD’s stock dipped slightly the same day — a split reaction that likely reflects investors crediting Core Scientific with a large, long-duration revenue lock-in while treating the deal as one incremental data point among many for AMD, a company already up more than 90% year-to-date.
The deal is also notable for what it doesn’t include: no disclosed GPU-purchase commitment from AMD itself, and no confirmation of which specific customers will ultimately occupy the leased capacity. That structure — reserving physical infrastructure ahead of firm chip orders — reflects how much of a bottleneck land, power, and cooling have become relative to chip supply itself; accelerators increasingly cannot generate revenue without energized, AI-ready buildings to sit in, regardless of how many units a company can manufacture.
What to watch next
- Whether the identity of the unnamed neocloud leasing 152 megawatts at Core Scientific’s Alabama and Georgia sites becomes public.
- Whether AMD confirms its Helios rack-scale systems will specifically run at these five sites.
- How the deal affects Core Scientific’s ability to secure additional colocation customers beyond AMD and its existing anchor, CoreWeave.
Sources
- Core Scientific ties its AI pivot to AMD in multi-gigawatt infrastructure deal — The Block
- Core Scientific Rises 5% as AMD Strikes $14 Billion AI Infrastructure Deal — Yahoo Finance
- AMD Secures Up to 2.5 GW of Core Scientific Data Centre Capacity — Data Center Dynamics
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