Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is a man with big dreams. Not only has he led the recent development of generative AI, but he has an even more ambitious goal: to reshape the global semiconductor industry and build a multi-trillion-dollar AI chip infrastructure.
According to Wall Street, Altman is pushing for a project aimed at increasing global chip manufacturing capacity and is in talks with different investors, including the United Arab Emirates. Altman could have to raise between $5 trillion and $7 trillion for the plan, according to one source. Doesn't that sound staggering? In fact, this is equivalent to all properties in the whole of Spain combined, with the UK's GDP in 2023 being 3At $14 trillion, the combined market capitalization of Microsoft and Apple, the largest publicly traded companies in the United States, is just over $6 trillion. Looking at the chip industry, the total size of the global semiconductor chip market last year was "only" $527 billion, and without Altman's project, it is not expected to reach $1 trillion by 2030 (data from McKinsey).
Why did Altman invest such a huge amount of money to build a new and complete chip industry chain? The reason is simple, because he needs more computing power to support OpenAI's large language models, such as GPT-5. Altman tweeted that today, OpenAI is capable of creating about 100 billion words of content per day, while humans around the world can collectively produce about 100 trillion words per day. This means that OpenAI's AI model has surpassed the ability of humans to produce text.
However, in order to catch up with the trend in the competition of large models, it is necessary to build powerful computing facilities, and AI chips are becoming a bottleneck, and they have limited the growth of OpenAI to a certain extent. Currently, OpenAI relies heavily on Nvidia's GPUs to run AI models, but Nvidia's GPUs are relatively limited and expensive. In the AI chip market, Nvidia controls about 80% of the share, and other competitors such as Google, Apple, Intel, AMD, etc., also have their own AI chip products, but they are difficult to compete with Nvidia.
Altman's chip plan is to break this pattern and provide more choices and advantages for OpenAI and other AI companies. According to reports, Altman has held discussions with representatives of the UAE, SoftBank, chip manufacturers, and even power suppliers. His goal is to build multiple chip factories around the world to replace GPUs with chips for AI, such as NPUs (neural network processors). Altman is also considering an alliance with South Korean giant Samsung to leverage its technology and experience in chip manufacturing.
Altman's chip plan is undoubtedly an extremely ambitious and challenging project, but also a project full of risks and uncertainties. After all, chip manufacturing is an industry with high investment, high threshold, and high complexity, which requires a large number of professionals, equipment, materials, technology, and policy support. Moreover, Altman's project may also raise some geopolitical sensitivities, such as concerns about the security and reliability of chip chains in the United States, and other countries' considerations of the competitiveness and influence of AI technology.
However, if Altman's chip plan is successful, OpenAI may further expand its current leading edge in AI technology, after all, this industrial chain must be a combination of software and hardware, giving priority to its own. For other AI companies and users, there may also be more chip choices and lower chip costs, thus promoting the wider application and development of AI technology.
Altman's chip plan, will it really happen soon? Will he be able to realize his grand dream of building the world's largest AI chip empire and challenging NVIDIA's supremacy? Let's wait and see.
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