OpenAI’s Altman seeks trillions of dollars for chip project
Sam Altman, the CEO of Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence pioneer OpenAI, could be asking for US$7 trillion dollars for an AI chip manufacturing project, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
It had already been reported that Altman was in talks to raise billions of dollars to build a network of wafer fabs (see OpenAI’s Altman wants to build multiple wafer fabs). This is apparently driven by concerns that there will not be enough manufacturing capacity to meet the on-coming demand for advanced AI processing chips.
Leading-edge wafer fabs typically cost $10 billion or $20 billion to establish. However, the Wall Street Journal has now reported that as much as US$5 trillion to US$7 trillion could be required for Altman’s project, referencing an unnamed person familiar with the project.
Such a scale of fundraising is unprecedented and would impact the entire semiconductor industry and the global economy. The semiconductor industry had annual sales of US$526.8 billion in 2023 (see Europe, Japan drag on December’s buoyant global chip market).
Therefore, at the high-end Altman’s funding raising would be 13x the chip industry’s annual revenue in 2023. As such it is clear that such a project faces enormous hurdles and may not happen.
According to reports Altman has had discussions with potential investors including Abu Dhabi-based Group 42 Holding Ltd., SoftBank Group and foundry TSMC. Altman, travelled to South Korea recently and reportedly met with SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won and executives from Samsung.
In many ways the biggest challenge that faces the semiconductor industry is not raising the volume of AI processors it manufactures but decreasing the energy consumption of the AI processors it does produce by several orders of magnitude.
Concerns are already being raised that data centers are creating an unsustainable power consumption burden on the planet.
Related links and articles:
OpenAI’s Altman wants to build multiple wafer fabs
Europe, Japan drag on December’s buoyant global chip market
Vodafone and Microsoft sign generative AI, cloud partnership
CFIUS review leads to AI startup losing Saudi backing
Microsoft unveils own-designed processors
Chatbot frenzy driving HBM demand, CoWoS shortage
If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :
