Short answers, pulled from the story.
AMD was formally incorporated on the 1st of May, 1969, by Jerry Sanders and seven colleagues from Fairchild Semiconductor: Ed Turney, John Carey, Sven Simonsen, Jack Gifford, Frank Botte, Jim Giles, and Larry Stenger. Sanders had been director of marketing at Fairchild before leaving to start his own semiconductor company.
In October 1981, AMD and Intel signed a 10-year technology exchange agreement, formally executed in February 1982. The deal allowed each company to become a second-source manufacturer of the other's chips by exchanging licenses of equivalent technical complexity. AMD became a licensed manufacturer of Intel's x86 processors, including the 8086, 8088, and 80286. Intel later refused to supply details for the 386 processor, leading to arbitration in 1987 and a legal dispute resolved in AMD's favor by the Supreme Court of California in 1994.
Zen is AMD's x86-64 microarchitecture introduced in 2017, built from the ground up by a team led by Jim Keller starting in 2012. AMD targeted a 40% improvement in instructions per clock and announced in February 2017 that it had achieved 52%. Ryzen processors based on Zen launched on the 2nd of March, 2017, and by 2019 AMD's Ryzen chips were reported to outsell Intel's consumer desktop processors.
AMD acquired ATI Technologies, a Canadian graphics chip company, for approximately $5.4 billion, closing the deal on the 25th of October 2006. The acquisition gave AMD a graphics processing business and enabled the Fusion initiative, which integrated CPU and GPU functions on a single die, later branded the AMD APU (Accelerated Processing Unit). AMD retired the ATI brand name in August 2010.
The PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 Pro, Xbox One S, Xbox One X, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and PlayStation 5 all use AMD-designed chips. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One used custom APUs based on AMD's Jaguar microarchitecture. The Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 use chips based on the Zen 2 microarchitecture with proprietary tweaks. The Steam Deck also uses a chip based on Zen 2.
In October 2025, AMD and OpenAI announced a multibillion-dollar partnership for AI data center development. OpenAI committed to purchasing six gigawatts of AMD chips over five years, expected to translate to tens of billions of dollars in new revenue for AMD by 2027. OpenAI received warrants for up to 160 million AMD shares at $0.01 per share, contingent on undisclosed performance targets, with the final tranche requiring AMD's common stock to reach $600 per share.