Sam Altman's OpenAI seeks up to $7 trillion in investment from investors for chips and AI

OpenAI led by Sam Altman has been on the forefront since the launch of ChatGPT which made Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) accessible to the mainstream audience. Now, the company's founder has another ambition as Altman is looking for major investment from various parties.

According to a report by The Wall Street Journal (Paywall), Sam Altman is looking to kickstart a new AI initiative which will focus more on the hardware side including custom made chips for AI. As per the report, Altman is in talks with various investors including the UAE government to source funds and may need up to a whopping $7 trillion.

The OpenAI chief executive officer is in talks with investors including the United Arab Emirates government to raise funds for a wildly ambitious tech initiative that would boost the world’s chip-building capacity and expand its ability to power AI, among other things, and cost several trillion dollars, according to people familiar with the matter. The project could require raising as much as $5 trillion to $7 trillion, one of the people said.

The plan aims at addressing the current problems faced by the industry including the scarcity of AI chips that are required to train Large Language Models (LLM) like ChatGPT. While in theory this could lead to advancements in generative AI, the report does addresses the elephant in the room.

The project requires an estimated investment of around $5 trillion to $7 trillion which is significantly more than total sales made by all of semi-conductor industry. Not only that, but the sum would be more than the total market capitalization of Microsoft and Apple combined, and would be out of this world in terms of corporate fund raising.

A spokesperson for the company gave the following statement to The Wall Street Journal:

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 U.S. government informed given the importance to national priorities, and look forward to sharing more details at a later date.

Altman has proposed bringing various players, including investors, chip makers, power companies and more to build dedicated chip foundries to produce the hardware required to run the next generation of AI. He reportedly also said that OpenAI will be a big customer of these chips but the discussions are still in the early stages.

In the recent weeks, Sam Altman has met with the UAE’s Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan, CEO of SoftBank Masayoshi Son and representatives from the TSMC. Microsoft, who has a large investment in OpenAI is aware about the company's efforts to raise funds and Altman has reportedly shared his plans with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott.

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