Here’s what OpenAI’s CEO is planning to challenge Nvidia
It'll cost trillions of dollars to make this a reality
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Sam Altman, the now-reinstated CEO of OpenAI, has been looking to up global investment in AI infrastructure in order to bring some much-needed changes to the semiconductor industry. Market leader Nvidia have been pushing AI chips to the forefront with their graphics cards, and Altman wants to introduce more competitiveness to the industry.
With Nvidia’s market cap reaching as high as $1.72 trillion in 2023, they have surpassed many other giants, Amazon included. That leaves somewhat of a monopoly and OpenAI have big plans to help bring some balance to the world of artificial intelligent hardware – now initiating talks with big-name investors.
OpenAI CEO looking to invest in AI infrastructure
OpenAI is one of the leaders when to comes to pushing artificial intelligence, particularly known for their ChatGPT chatbot and associated AI research. A report in The Wall Street Journal claims that CEO Sam Altman is in talks with a number of high-profile investors including the United Arab Emirates government to secure funds to accelerate AI infrastructure production. This includes semiconductor fabrication plants, energy, datacenters and more – to a higher level than is currently planned.
He says that AI chips are high in demand and current supply is lackluster in order to support OpenAI, Google, and more with their language models. This isn’t the first time Altman has invested in AI chip development; previous ventures haven’t yet come to fruition – including the code-named ‘Tigris’ project which he had hoped to help compete with Nvidia.
How much will this cost?
Outlet Interesting Engineering have reported on the issue of costs and point towards estimations of between $5 trillion and $7 trillion to help rework the semiconductor industry to facilitate Altman’s big ambitions. Nvidia’s GPUs are currently the number one resource for AI-acceleration applications. With this much money required to make it happen, it seems like a sudden change is unlikely – but interest is definitely there to grow development.
On a related note, the US government has also announced plans to spend $11 billion on semiconductor development, the centerpiece of which being the National Semiconductor Technology Center which will be a hub for research and prototype development.
