Facebook owner Meta Platforms will buy artificial intelligence chips from Advanced Micro Devices in a deal that will also give it the opportunity to buy up to a 10% stake of the chip company.
News of the AMD deal comes just days after Meta announced a long-term partnership where it will use millions of chips and other equipment from Nvidia for its artificial-intelligence data centers.
Meta will buy AMD's latest chips, the MI450, to help power data centers. The 6-gigawatt agreement will see shipments supporting the first gigawatt deployment set to start during the second half of this year. The agreement could potentially be worth more than $100 billion.
AMD is looking to keep pace with Nvidia in the AI craze that’s widely viewed as the biggest tectonic shift in technology since Apple co—founder Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone.
Nvidia carved out an early lead in tailoring its chipsets known as graphics processing units, or GPUs, from use in powering video games to helping to train powerful AI systems, like the technology behind ChatGPT and image generators. Demand skyrocketed as more people began using AI chatbots. Tech companies scrambled for more chips to build and run them.
While the appetite for AI chips is still large, there are some concerns about how much companies like Meta are spending on AI and whether they can make back their huge investments through higher profits and productivity in the future.
For Meta, the company has been pushing to revive its commercial AI efforts as the company faces tough competition from rivals such as Google and OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT. In June, the company made a $14.3 billion investment in AI data company Scale and recruited its CEO Alexandr Wang to help lead a team developing “superintelligence” at the tech giant. And in December, Meta bought artificial intelligence startup Manus, as the owner of Instagram continues an aggressive push to amp up AI offerings across its platforms.
AMD issued Meta a performance-based warrant for up to 160 million shares of its common stock at $0.01 a piece, structured to vest as long as certain milestones are achieved.
The first tranche vests with the initial 1-gigawatt of shipments, with additional tranches vesting as Meta’s purchases scale to 6 gigawatts.
Shares of AMD jumped more than 9% before the market open on Tuesday.
FILE -A Meta logo is shown on a video screen at LlamaCon 2025, an AI developer conference, in Menlo Park, Calif., April 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
It has been exactly four years since Russia launched its large-scale invasion of Ukraine, attacking the country from multiple directions. On Feb. 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a “special operation," a campaign that many expected to be brief and to end with Kyiv's capitulation.
Instead, European officials are traveling to the Ukrainian capital on Tuesday to show their support for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people, who are fighting on.
While Putin did not get the quick and overwhelming victory he had hoped for, the cost has been high on both sides. And as Europe’s biggest conflict enters its fifth year, there is no sign of any peace deal despite U.S. diplomatic efforts over the past year.
Here’s the latest:
South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa said Tuesda y that a group of 11 South African men allegedly lured to fight alongside Russian soldiers in the war against Ukraine are expected to return home soon.
South Africa’s government said in December that it had received distress calls from the men who were trapped in Ukraine’s war-torn eastern Donbas region. The men had joined mercenary forces under the pretext of lucrative employment contracts, the government said.
Their travel to Russia appears consistent with other reports of African men who have been recruited to fight in the war against Ukraine, including over 1,000 from Kenya, according to an intelligence report presented to the Kenyan parliament last week. Four other South Africans returned home last week.
At least 200,000 Russian troops have died during Russia’s four-year invasion of Ukraine, independent media outlets reported Tuesday.
Russian news outlet Mediazona, together with the BBC and a team of volunteers, has collected the names of 200,186 troops killed in the war by scouring news reports, social media and government websites.
Neither Moscow nor Kyiv gives timely data on military losses, and each is at pains to amplify the other side’s casualties. Russia has publicly acknowledged the deaths of just over 6,000 soldiers.
European lawmakers cheered Zelenskyy who met with them on a videoconference during an extraordinary session of the European Parliament commemorating the anniversary of the war's start.
Lawmakers from Portugal to Finland praised Ukraine and blasted Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán, whose last minute objection sank new efforts to help Ukraine and raise the costs on Russia for prosecuting the war.
“He has become Putin's cheap servant, Viktor Orbán, in the last years and also today has not only betrayed Ukraine, he has betrayed all of us. He has betrayed Europe,” said German member of parliament Terry Reintke.
While a few criticized Ukraine, an overwhelming majority of lawmakers lauded Ukrainian resolve, wore blue and yellow flower pins, blasted Putin and pledged continued support for the war-ravaged nation many see as a future EU member.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has paid tribute to the resilience of Ukrainians as he told his Cabinet that Kyiv’s allies “must defeat the falsehood that Russia is winning.”
“When this conflict broke out four years ago, it was assumed it would be a matter of weeks before Putin took the whole of Ukraine. That’s what everybody believed," Starmer said.
“Four years later, the Ukrainians are holding out against that aggression, holding out on the front line where the circumstances are extremely challenging, but also holding out in civilian life where every day Ukrainians get up and go to work as a sign of resilience and defiance.
Starmer said that over the last year alone, "Russia took 0.8% of land in Ukraine at a terrible cost to themselves, half a million losses.”
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Russia has not achieved all of its goals in its war on Ukraine, but that Russia’s operation would continue and that Russian interests would be secured.
When asked how Russia had changed over the last four years, Peskov said that Russian society had rallied around Putin. He also said that Russian society had matured in “understanding our roots” and “understanding what is good and what is bad in international affairs around the world.”
He said the past four years have been very important in Russia's history and that the country will move forward.
More than a dozen senior European officials arrived in Kyiv on Tuesday in a show of support. But they also come without two new deals they had hoped to present to Kyiv — a new package of sanctions on Russia and a 90 billion euro loan to fund Ukraine's defense for the next two years.
Hungary, seen as most pro-Russian country in the European Union, blocked them both. It's a sign of how difficult it has been sometimes to maintain solidarity as the war drags on.
Zelenskyy said his country has withstood the onslaught by Russia’s bigger and better equipped army, which over the past year of fighting captured just 0.79% of Ukraine’s territory, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank.
“Looking back at the beginning of the invasion and reflecting on today, we have every right to say: we have defended our independence, we have not lost our statehood; Putin has not achieved his goals,” Zelenskyy said on social media.
“He has not broken Ukrainians; he has not won this war,” Zelenskyy said.
French President Emmanuel Macron said in a post on the social platform X that “this war is a triple failure for Russia: military, economic, and strategic.”
“It has strengthened NATO — the very expansion Russia sought to prevent — galvanized Europeans it hoped to weaken, and laid bare the fragility of an imperialism from another age," Macron said.
Macron also urged the EU to issue the 90 billion euro ($106 billion) loan to Ukraine, a plan that requires the unanimity of the 27 member states.
“There is no justification for calling this into question. We must now deliver on it,” he wrote.
Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer were to join a meeting of Western leaders supporting Ukraine, the so-called Coalition of the Willing, via videoconference on Tuesday.
Britain’s Armed Forces Minister Al Carns says the war has been “the most defining conflict” in decades due to the way it has revolutionized warfare and upended Europe’s security.
“I would never have guessed in my lifetime I would see North Korean troops fighting on the border of Europe,” Carns told reporters on Monday. “Which I think is a significant warning signal to all of us.”
Carns said the conflict had brought a “revolution in military affairs,” especially through the rapid development of drone technology. Drones now account for the vast majority of battlefield casualties in the war.
Western officials say that in the last three months, Russia has lost more casualties than the number of troops it recruits, a potential tipping point.
“The cost on Russia has been almost unimaginable,” Carns said, calling a Western estimate of 1.25 million Russian personnel killed and wounded since 2022 likely an underestimate.
European leaders visiting Kyiv hailed the Ukrainian struggle.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said the Ukrainians are “standing up for the freedom of us all. Their courage and strength shine in the fight against Putin’s darkness. And they give hope to those of us who want a Europe at peace.”
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, said: “We don’t yet know when the war will end, but how it ends will affect Sweden’s security for at least a generation to come. And that’s why our continued support is so crucial.”
Poland’s Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski vowed from Kyiv that his country would remain “steadfast in its support for the Ukrainian people and in its pursuit of a just and lasting peace.”
“A victory parade was supposed to take place here after a few days,” Sikorski said in an address from Kyiv referring to Russia’s initial plans of a quick takeover of Ukraine. “Instead, four years later, Kyiv is still defending itself.”
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said Ukraine’s allies will continue to militarily support the war-ravaged nation to end the war and ensure a lasting peace.
“Ukraine needs ammunition today and every day, until the bloodshed stops. Ukraine continues to blunt Russia’s aggression, and despite Putin’s posturing, Russia has failed to meet their ambitions on the battlefield,” he said during a ceremony at NATO headquarters in Brussels.
“There cannot be true peace in Europe without real peace in Ukraine. When the fighting eventually stops, the peace has to hold with strong Ukrainian forces ready to deter and defend and effective security guarantees from Ukraine’s partners: Europe, Canada, and the United States.”
A Chinese government spokesperson noted that the door to dialogue had recently opened in what she called the Ukraine crisis, avoiding describing the conflict as a war.
“We hope all parties will seize the opportunity to reach a comprehensive, lasting and binding peace agreement,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said when asked about the fourth anniversary of the outbreak of the war.
China has been accused of not doing enough to pressure Russia to end the fighting. It has maintained ties and trade with Russia, relieving some of the pressure of economic sanctions. China says its position is impartial and objective.
“China never fans the flames or seeks to profit from the situation, and of course we do not accept any attempts to shift blame onto China,” Mao said.
Matthias Schmale, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Ukraine, noted that the costs for the country’s recovery from the war are now estimated at $590 billion over a decade — three times Ukraine’s GDP last year.
Schmale said by video link to a U.N. briefing in Geneva on Tuesday that over 10.8 million people, roughly a quarter of Ukraine’s population, remain in need of humanitarian assistance – including up to 1 million in Russian-occupied territory.
He also noted that that Ukraine is one of the world’s most-mined countries, with almost a quarter of its territory “potentially contaminated.”
Liliia, 30, whose boyfriend is a prisoner of war, walks through a city park in Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, Feb. 21, 2026. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits)
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks to widows of Russian fallen servicemen during a military action in Ukraine, as Admiral Igor Kostyukov, head of Russian military intelligence (GRU), third left, attends a meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow, on Monday, Feb. 23, 2026. (Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
A South Korean protester holds a banner to denounce Russia's invasion of Ukraine on the fourth anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine war, near the Russian Embassy in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026. A banner reads "Victory will be ours." (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)
