Huh.
From the Wall Street Journal, February 8:
OpenAI chief pursues investors including the U.A.E. for a project possibly requiring up to $7 trillion
Sam Altman was already trying to lead the development of human-level artificial intelligence. Now he has another great ambition: raising trillions of dollars to reshape the global semiconductor industry.
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 fundraising plans, which face significant obstacles, are aimed at solving constraints to OpenAI’s growth, including the scarcity of the pricey AI chips required to train large language models behind AI systems such as ChatGPT. Altman has often complained that there aren’t enough of these kinds of chips—known as graphics processing units, or GPUs—to power OpenAI’s quest for artificial general intelligence, which it defines as systems that are broadly smarter than humans.
Such a sum of investment would dwarf the current size of the global semiconductor industry. Global sales of chips were $527 billion last year and are expected to rise to $1 trillion annually by 2030. Global sales of semiconductor manufacturing equipment—the costly machinery needed to run chip factories—last year were $100 billion, according to an estimate by the industry group SEMI.
The amounts Altman has discussed would also be outlandishly large by the standards of corporate fundraising—larger than the national debt of some major global economies and bigger than giant sovereign-wealth funds.
Total U.S. corporate-debt issuance last year was $1.44 trillion, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. The combined market capitalization of
Microsoft and Apple, the two highest-valued businesses in the U.S., is roughly $6 trillion.
The fundraising talks are the latest example of ambitious plans from Altman that seek to change the world. Besides kicking off the generative AI revolution in late 2022 with OpenAI’s public release of ChatGPT—an early step in its effort toward building human-level artificial intelligence—he has invested heavily in startups aiming to make cheap energy from nuclear fusion and extend the human lifespan by a decade.Energy also factors into Altman’s new fundraising plans because AI facilities consume enormous amounts of electricity.
Realizing his ambitions for chips and other areas needed to support AI would require persuading a complex, globe-spanning network of funders, industry partners and governments—including getting the assent of the U.S., for which the semiconductor industry is a strategic priority. Altman met with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and discussed the initiative, according to people familiar with the matter.
“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,” said an OpenAI spokeswoman. “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.”
As part of the talks, Altman is pitching a partnership between OpenAI, various investors, chip makers and power providers, which together would put up money to build chip foundries that would then be run by existing chip makers, some of the people said. OpenAI would agree to be a significant customer of the new factories. Much of the effort could be funded by debt, one of the people said. The discussions are in their early stages, the full list of potential investors isn’t known, and the effort could span years and ultimately might not succeed.....
....MUCH MORE
I guess we're going to have to add an order of magnitude or three to this from January 21:Chips: "Now OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants billions for AI chip fabs"
