Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash
 

CNBC is reporting that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is seeking a massive investment – potentially up to $7 trillion – to fund a new project aimed at expanding the global semiconductor industry’s capacity to produce AI chips.

This initiative is seen as a response to the current supply-and-demand problem in the AI chip market, where the demand from AI companies (including OpenAI) far exceeds the available supply. The scarcity of AI chips is a bottleneck that limits the growth of these companies, which rely on these chips to train large language models (like ChatGPT).

I’m not sure how Sam came up with the $7 trillion number. It’s more money than the market capitalizations of the world’s largest tech companies combined. That said, chip-making is extremely capital intensive – and AI is a super-chip-hungry business – so let’s see if there’s a new, safe, awesome, $7 trillion supply chain in our future.

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