Is OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman starting an AI chip factory?
Sam Altman has been working on raising Billions of dollars to begin making his own AI chip factories (or Fabs as they call them in the industry).
He’s on the record as stating that he sees a shortage of AI chips right now, and that will continue to extend well into the future.
So he’s making plans to change that.
His new venture, an offshoot of OpenAI, is raising funds that could potentially value this new venture at $100 Billion dollars with a capital B!
His goal is to use the funds to set up a network of factories to manufacture semiconductors, and he’s talking to some of the biggest chip companies in the world about partnering. Additionally, he’s talking with both Abu Dhabi-based G42, which according to their website aims to be “a global leader in creating visionary artificial intelligence for a better tomorrow.”, and SoftBank out of Japan who’s more famously known for backing such luminary startups as Uber and WeWork.
Building an AI chip fab, or multiple chip factories across the world, won’t be cheap. According to an article in Fortune “the cost to construct a single state-of-the-art fabrication plant can require tens of billions of dollars, and creating a network of such facilities would take years. The talks with G42 alone had focused on raising $8 billion to $10 billion.”
All of this news of raising funding to build their own chip factory comes only a few months after Sam Altman was fired, then rehired, by OpenAI in a high-tech palace coup. Can’t wait to see what 2024 has in store for Sam Altman and OpenAI!
