Synopsys Bets on AI-Designed Chips, Inking Deals With OpenAI and AWS in a Single Day
The chip-design software giant will share revenue with OpenAI on a new model called GPT-Synopsys, and Amazon Web Services agreed to a $1 billion-plus licensing deal.
Synopsys had the busiest day of any chip company on Wednesday. The company announced a partnership with OpenAI to build an AI model that designs chips, and a separate deal worth more than $1 billion with Amazon Web Services.
The OpenAI deal, announced at a Synopsys investor summit, will produce a model called GPT-Synopsys. It will be trained and tuned for chip design work, starting from a description of a chip’s circuits and running all the way to laying out billions of transistors on a small square of silicon.
OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman said in a video announcing the deal that the model will learn to use Synopsys’s software tools to help engineers work through the trade-offs and optimizations of chip design, with the aim of “shaving off weeks, months from the design process and to bring more chips to the world.”
The money flows both ways. OpenAI will pay Synopsys a training subscription fee for teaching the model to use its tools. When Synopsys customers use the finished product, the two companies will share revenue based on how well the model improves the design of a chip.
“We structured the agreement in a way that it will not be cannibalizing our business,” Synopsys CEO Sassine Ghazi told Reuters. “It will be an upside to our business given we’re delivering more value to the customer.”
Guardrails on the AI
Synopsys says the model’s work will still be checked by traditional verification tools before any chip ships. “The model needs these guardrails in order to check the physics,” Ghazi said, adding that sign-off — the industry’s final proof that a chip will actually work — remains essential.
A second deal, and a raised forecast
The same day, Amazon’s cloud unit agreed to a multi-year deal worth more than $1 billion to license chip design blueprints from Synopsys, focused on designs optimized for specific types of chips. Neither company said which AWS chips will use them. AWS designs its own Graviton processors and Trainium AI chips.
Synopsys’s blueprint-licensing business brought in $1.75 billion in its most recent fiscal year, a market where it competes with Arm Holdings. As part of the deal, Synopsys will also adopt AWS computing and storage services, plus Amazon Bedrock, to build and deploy AI applications.
At the investor summit, Ghazi raised Synopsys’s fiscal 2027 revenue growth forecast to 15 percent, above analyst estimates of 11.19 percent, according to LSEG data. Shares rose as much as 7 percent after the announcements.
