Turing cuts Nvidia reliance, taps AMD for 10% of AI training
AMD Ventures has taken a stake in Turing, a Japanese self-driving startup, and Turing has begun running part of its AI training on AMD chips instead of Nvidia’s. The deal itself is tiny. AMD hasn’t disclosed how much it invested, and Turing has never sold a car. Yet AMD shares jumped roughly 3% in ...
Overview
AMD Ventures has taken a stake in Turing, a Japanese self-driving startup, and Turing has begun running part of its AI training on AMD chips instead of Nvidia’s.
The deal itself is tiny. AMD hasn’t disclosed how much it invested, and Turing has never sold a car.
Yet AMD shares jumped roughly 3% in premarket trading Monday the moment the news broke, according to TipRanks. That reaction says less about Turing than it does about how hungry the market is for any sign AMD can pull business away from Nvidia’s default position. The whole of Wall Street is watching closely.
Why Turing decided to split its GPU spending
Turing built its AI systems entirely on Nvidia hardware for training and inference since it launched five years ago. Now about 10% of that training workload runs on AMD graphics processors, company executives told Bloomberg.
AMD sits a short drive from Nvidia’s Santa Clara headquarters, and it offered a real chance to diversify supply and cut costs, the executives said.
We’ve made notable progress with the technology.
The company still plans to reach consumers and robotaxi fleets by 2028, according to Bloomberg, and it raised $79 million in an equity and debt extension last year that valued it near $600 million.
Splitting GPU spending now gives Turing leverage in future price negotiations, a hedge that matters more as compute costs climb toward that launch date.
Turing also partnered with auto supplier Denso last year to help it move toward commercial production, according to a Nikkei Asia report. That partnership gives Turing manufacturing credibility, but it remains a minor player next to Nvidia’s grip on autonomous driving compute.
AMD’s stake doesn’t change that scale gap overnight, and investors should treat this as an early-stage bet rather than a settled customer win.
Why a small robotaxi deal moved AMD stock before breakfast
AMD’s jump didn’t last as an isolated event. Goldman Sachs raised its price target on AMD to $640 from $450 Monday, and Citi added the stock to its upside catalyst list, according to Investing.com. The stock found strong momentum during the session, surging from a low of $527.04 to hit $556.64. The rally was sparked by reports of delays to Nvidia's Kyber rack system, a claim Nvidia has since pushed back against by stating its roadmap is intact.
The Turing news arrived first and still moved the stock on its own. That timing matters for investors because AMD currently trades at a premium built on the idea that it is the industry’s guaranteed second source to Nvidia at scale.
Details
Every proof point outside AMD’s marquee hyperscaler deals, however small, reinforces that story, and the market priced this one in before the bigger analyst calls even landed.
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AMD’s venture arm is buying access, not a chip order
AMD hasn’t issued its own statement confirming the Turing investment. Its newsroom’s most recent release, a June 16 deal with Rackspace Technology, predates the Turing report by three weeks, based on the company’s own site. That silence fits how AMD Ventures typically operates.
AMD’s own investment pages describe its mission as backing companies aligned with pervasive AI and next-generation compute, with a portfolio that already includes Hugging Face and humanoid robotics startups.
Related: AMD analyst sees something beyond Nvidia’s shadow
An equity stake buys AMD something a single GPU sale can’t: a seat at the table before Nvidia’s software ecosystem locks in as the default, and a chance to shape Turing’s roadmap directly.
The AI proxy war beyond the data center
Turing is not alone in the race. Nissan and U.K. startup Wayve agreed to collaborate on a driver-assistance system aimed at mass-produced vehicles by fiscal 2027, according to Nikkei Asia, and that timeline is exactly why AMD wanted a foothold in Turing now rather than after it locks in a permanent chip supplier.
Corporate venture capital has quietly become a proxy war between chipmakers fighting for design wins years before the hardware ships at volume.
AMD’s Advancing AI event lands in three weeks, and investors will be watching whether it produces hyperscaler news as large as the Meta and OpenAI deals that built AMD’s current premium.
Until then, the open question is whether Turing’s AMD allocation grows past 10% before 2028, or whether it stays a rounding error the moment a rival chip wins the next design cycle.
Related: Top Analyst strongly resets AMD stock price target
Source
Originally published at www.thestreet.com.
