OpenAI would be getting closer to manufacturing its own artificial intelligence chips. The company led by Sam Altman would be in talks with TSMC to open a plant. The Taiwanese foundry is one of the most important in the world and produces chips for Apple, AMD, Qualcomm, NVIDIA and others.
A report of Financial Times assures that Sam Altman has met with some of the investors with the largest capital in the Middle East to finance a chip factory. On the list is Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, national security advisor to the United Arab Emirates and one of the richest people in the world.
The CEO of OpenAI seeks financing to start one of its most ambitious projects: the design and manufacturing of artificial intelligence chips. With this, the company would reduce your dependence on NVIDIA and would ensure demand for semiconductors, one of the most frequent problems faced due to chip shortages.
To get it, Altman approached Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, a leader in semiconductor foundry. TSMC has 59% of the market share, surpassing companies such as Samsung, Intel, UMC and GlobalFoundries. The Taiwanese company has the capacity to produce 3nm chips and has N7+ technology, the first extreme ultraviolet lithographic process available in the industry.
OpenAI wants to emulate Amazon and Google, who make their own AI chips. At the moment the plans are unknown, although the rumor has been circulating for a few months. In October, Reuters reported that the creators of ChatGPT were evaluating the purchase of a company to help them solve the chip shortage.
Those led by Sam Altman use computers with NVIDIA graphics cards to train their AI models.
OpenAI is not the only one that wants to manufacture its artificial intelligence chips
While Sam Altman tours Abu Dhabi in search of an investor to help you realize your next adventure, other AI companies are considering the same path. Microsoft is one of them, which would take advantage of agreements with AMD to help it develop semiconductors that drive AI applications.
Microsoft and AMD have several projects together, with the Xbox Series X|S consoles being one of the most important. In accordance with Bloomberg, AMD wants to steal a piece of the pie from NVIDIA, so it would help Microsoft design AI chips. The alliance has been in the works for a few years, although plans were accelerated during 2023, after the explosion in popularity of ChatGPT.
On the other hand, Meta has stepped on the accelerator in this area. Mark Zuckerberg announced a few days ago that would speed up the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI). The company is creating an unprecedented infrastructure to support these efforts and announced that before the end of 2024 they will have 600,000 NVIDIA H100 graphics cards to train their models.
At the moment, NVIDIA owns 95% of the artificial intelligence chip market. If OpenAI and Microsoft achieve their goal, this percentage would be considerably reduced.