CNBC is reporting that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is seeking a massive investment – potentially up to $7 trillion – to fund a new project aimed at expanding the global semiconductor industry’s capacity to produce AI chips.
This initiative is seen as a response to the current supply-and-demand problem in the AI chip market, where the demand from AI companies (including OpenAI) far exceeds the available supply. The scarcity of AI chips is a bottleneck that limits the growth of these companies, which rely on these chips to train large language models (like ChatGPT).
I’m not sure how Sam came up with the $7 trillion number. It’s more money than the market capitalizations of the world’s largest tech companies combined. That said, chip-making is extremely capital intensive – and AI is a super-chip-hungry business – so let’s see if there’s a new, safe, awesome, $7 trillion supply chain in our future.
Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.