Reinstated OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman is planning to raise trillions of dollars to disrupt the Artificial Intelligence (AI) chips manufacturing industry, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing people familiar with the matter.
Brief background
In hindsight, Sam Altman emerged as a very controversial personality in the AI space last year. On November 17, OpenAI officially fired Sam Altman as the CEO of the company despite being a co-founder because “he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board.”
The shake-up stimulated huge chaos in OpenAI, including a companywide rebellion. Within just days of Altman’s departure, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI reinstated him as the CEO.
Fundraising plan details
In a significant turn of events, the 38-year-old AI leader initiated its next big step in the AI space with an ambition to raise “trillions of dollars” for global AI chip production.
Altman has reportedly connected with major investors, including the United Arab Emirates government to raise the necessary funds to establish a global network of AI silicon chips. Altman also had a meeting with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to seek the US government’s support.
According to one of the unnamed sources, the proposed project may require at least $5 trillion to $7 trillion. The proposed project would reportedly necessitate cooperation among OpenAI, chip manufacturers, and energy companies to establish chip factories.
OpenAI would be the factories’ major client, while the chip manufacturers would operate the facilities.
“OpenAI has had productive discussions about increasing global infrastructure and supply chains for chips, energy and data centers—which are crucial for AI and other industries that rely on them. We will continue to keep the US government informed given the importance to national priorities, and look forward to sharing more details at a later date.”
OpenAI spokeswoman said in a statement
Potential impact
CEO Altman’s ambitious plan would significantly stimulate the world’s chip production capacity and expand its capability to power AI, among others.
In addition, it will also aid OpenAI in addressing some of its major challenges, including AI chip scarcity and high prices. It must be noted that AI chips are crucial to train the company’s large language models that power its AI systems such as ChatGPT.
As per the report, CEO Altman has often pointed out the lack of AI chips commonly referred to as ” graphics-processing units” (GPUs) to support OpenAI’s push for artificial general intelligence, systems that are apparently “smarter than humans.”
CEO Alman hinted at his plans in his recent X post this week.
“We believe the world needs more AI infrastructure–fab capacity, energy, datacenters, etc– than people are currently planning to build. Building massive-scale AI infrastructure, and a resilient supply chain, is crucial to economic competitiveness. OpenAI will try to help!”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
OpenAI investor Microsoft is apparently aware of Altman’s ambitious AI chip initiative, with CEO Satya Nadella and Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott supporting the project.
