No, Sam Altman Isn’t Raising Trillions of Dollars For Chips

Contrary to popular belief, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman isn’t raising trillions of dollars for a large project to develop new server chips for artificial intelligence. 

A Wall Street Journal report last week that implied Altman was seeking up to $7 trillion worth of capital for what sounds like a joint venture to end all joint ventures caused quite a stir. But in reality, Altman privately has told people that figure represents the sum total of investments that participants in such a venture would need to make, in everything from real estate and power for data centers to the manufacturing of the chips, over some period of years.

That figure isn’t necessarily crazy. Just this week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at an event in the United Arab Emirates that $1 trillion worth of new data centers would need to be built in the next four to five years to handle all of the AI computing that’s coming. Huang, whose firm pioneered the graphics processing units that OpenAI uses to develop its technology, joked that $7 trillion would be enough to buy “all the GPUs, apparently.”