Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is now planning to raise trillions of dollars in funding to reshape the global semiconductor industry after successfully launching its innovative artificial intelligence product, ChatGPT. The sheer scale of this fundraising rivals the national debt and large sovereign wealth** of some major economies, and even eclipses the size of the entire global semiconductor industry.
According to a ** report on Friday, a person familiar with the matter revealed that Altman is in talks with investors, including the United Arab Emirates, hoping to raise this huge amount of money to improve global chip manufacturing capacity, so as to better promote the development of OpenAI's artificial intelligence. There are reports that the project could need to raise up to $5 trillion to $7 trillion.
This fundraising scale is not only far more than the $527 billion in global chip sales last year, but even the $1 trillion in global chip sales in 2030. According to estimates by industry group SEMI, global semiconductor manufacturing equipment sales were only $100 billion last year.
By the standard of corporate financing, the amount of funding that Altman sought was unprecedented. Last year, U.S. companies issued about 1$44 trillion, which is particularly large in comparison, the money that Ultraman is seeking.
According to people familiar with the matter.
It was revealed that Ultraman plans to establish a cooperative relationship between OpenAI, various investors, chip manufacturers and power companies. They plan to co-fund chip foundries to be operated by existing chipmakers, and OpenAI will be a significant customer of these new factories.
As the demand for AI grows dramatically, there are growing concerns about chips** and the power needed to run them. For example, Nvidia, a leader in the field of AI chips, has been in short supply of chips.
Altman's goal is to solve various problems that constrain OpenAI's development, including the scarcity of AI chips needed to train large models such as ChatGPT. Altman has repeatedly complained that there is a lack of enough GPU chips to support OpenAI's pursuit of general artificial intelligence.