Sam Altman 'raising billions' for new chip venture
The CEO of the world's leading AI company, OpenAI, is rumoured to be talking to investors about building an ambitious new network of semiconductor fabrication plants.
According to insider sources cited by Fortune, Sam Altman has been meeting with investors to raise the billions of dollars needed to build new facilities, and thereby insure the future of next-gen AI tech.
Altman is aware of the huge demand from the industry for advanced chips, and the relative lack of capacity among fabs to meet it. Chip design companies such as NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel can't access AI GPUs fast enough as giants of the tech and consumer electronics world go deep into AI-based products and services.
Meta, for example, is putting 600,000 x NVIDIA H100 AI GPU-equivalent compute performance into its AI efforts, which is soaking up much of the AI GPU hardware capacity in 2024 and beyond.
The story in Fortune says Altman wants to create a comprehensive network of semiconductor manufacturing plants, and has met with Abu Dhabi-based G42 and SoftBank Group. He is rumoured to be in talks with TSMC too. However, the full list of partners and funders is undisclosed.
OpenAI kick-started the consumer AI age when it launched Chat GPT in 2022. It is now working on a new version of its flagship AI model, GPT-4, expected to launch this year.
