OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is in talks with investors, including from the United Arab Emirates, to raise between $5 trillion to $7 trillion in funding. The goal, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, is to increase the world’s chip manufacturing capacity and enhance AI capabilities.
The fundraising efforts are part of a broader strategy to address OpenAI’s growth constraints, particularly the scarcity of AI chips needed for training large language models like ChatGPT.
Altman’s proposal is said to include forming a partnership with investors, chip manufacturers, and power providers to finance the construction of chip foundries, which would then be operated by the chip manufacturers.
It’s both. Basically, if he’s right that this is among the most important tech in world history and deserves $7 trillion in research, it’ll make OpenAI the du jour monopolist over said most important tech in world history if he gets it. Outright dystopian.
Read the last paragraph of the OP at least. This is not asking for $5 trillion to be handed solely to OpenAI to go become a world monopoly on chip manufacture. What he’s really asking is for investors to direct funds to radically increasing world compute capacity, to the profit for the chip manufacturers and likely many others. OpenAI just gets to continue the track it’s on without this constraint. There is nothing here about them monopolistically controlling this entire investment and in fact the opposite is true: it’s framed as a broad partnership venture.