OpenAI CEO Altman Said to be in Talks to Raise Trillions for AI Chip, Power Initiative

0:00Nash Falls is the relentless new thriller from number one New York Times bestselling author David Baldacci When mild-mannered business analyst Walter Nash is recruited by the FBI to help bring down a global crime network, his life is turned completely upside down. Publishers Weekly says, in Baldacci's long list of heroes, Walter Nash is among the most memorable. Experience the full cast audio production of Nash Falls, led by McLeod Andrews. Available from Hachette Audio wherever audiobooks are sold. Also available in hardcover and e-book. OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman is apparently in talks right now to raise$7 trillion for AI chips and to power all of them.

0:42This is a massive initiative that is a huge chunk of the entire globe's GDP. I think somewhere between like 12 % and 25 % of the entire globe's GDP, and he's looking to raise this to essentially create what AI chips. Now, there's been a lot of comments on this. Today, I want to break down exactly why he's doing this, where he plans on going with this, and a lot of the commentary that comes out following this. So the reason that I think this is so important is because this literally is a move that I think could completely reshape the global technology landscape. This is like an absurd amount of money.

1:17I saw a lot of, you know, jokes and memes essentially posted on X where people were, you know, saying like VCs love him. So they're like, Sam, what's your latest venture? Just name your price. How much are you raising? And he's like,$7 trillion. And, you know, it's like them all choking and stuff. So, I mean, in reality, where do you get$7 trillion? This is an unheard of amount of money. And this is a massive initiative. So right now, with everything that he's planning on doing, it's essentially to massively expand the world's semiconductor manufacturing capacity. That's really why he's trying to do all of this.

1:51And this is, you know, specifically tailored for AI, of course. and you know, one thing that a lot of people are talking about is you wouldn't be making a move like this, something that seems so ludicrous, something that seems so massive, if you didn't have, you know, like some very groundbreaking technology. A lot of people are speculating that they are on the path, on the verge, close to or have achieved AGI. They have an artificial intelligence and they're moving towards it that is going to be so powerful, they just need an insane amount of more energy to run this thing and more chips. Like we are already in a massive chip shortage.

2:25NVIDIA is absolutely crushing it. They're selling, you know, more than they, they have more orders than they can fulfill essentially. And so right now the big problem is like, how do you get more chips? And Apple's about to jump into the arena and buy and essentially need to generate massive amounts of chips for what they're doing with AI and Apple products. And so OpenAI sees a hole in the market that they want to fill essentially here. So there was a detailed report by the Wall Street Journal and Sam Altman, essentially they have found that he's been engaged in discussions with a bunch of different high profile investors and also government officials to us to secure this funding right and i think it's actually ranging somewhere between five and seven trillion dollars which is you know beyond ambitious in my opinion this is absolutely insane um but all of this is going towards a huge partnership network um which open ai is going to lead which is essentially chip manufacturing energy suppliers, and then also government entities worldwide working together to create this.

3:24This would be something absolutely astronomical if he's able to pull it off. So at the center of this initiative, there's a collaboration that's fairly strategic. This is between Taiwan's semiconductor manufacturing company, and that's alongside a few other influential investors. The UAE government apparently is interested in this, as well as SoftBank CEO who's interested in this. So Sam Altman's vision right now, just all this essentially just involves like tapping into the financial reserves of the Middle East investors to finance this. And this is going to be a massive operation, which is going to have dozens of chip fabrication plants.

4:06Well, I think all of them will be kind of under Taiwan Semiconductor Company. And so that's it's going to that's essentially their partner to create this, right? They're not doing this with no experience, but this is a lot of money and they believe that there's going to be the demand for it. So the whole initiative is not just about scaling up semiconductor production though, it's also a pretty comprehensive strategy to boost the entire AI infrastructure. So this is everything from energy solutions to data centers to a really resilient supply chain. So Sam Altman made a Twitter post about this and he kind of underlies this, you know, this whole vision.

4:41He says, quote, quote, we believe the world needs more AI infrastructure, fab capacity, energy data centers, et cetera, than people are currently planning to build. Building massive scale AI infrastructure and a resilient supply chain is critical to economic competitiveness. OpenAI will try to help. So this is interesting. A lot of people are like, thanks, man, you're helping. So a lot of people believe he's helping. I mean, I think this is necessary, whether you believe he's just trying to help the world or he just is, you know, sees a massive opportunity in the market, I think is irrelevant in a sense that this seems like one of those massive bets, but it's looking more and more, especially from his position and the information that he has, that this might be one that is highly important.

5:22So Sam Altman, you know, he has been talking to a bunch of big figures within the U.S. government as well, including the Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, and that is highlighting, I think, the national significance of enhancing U.S. chipmaking capabilities, right? This is something with the CHIPS Act that was passed recently that the United States is focusing heavily on. We rely very heavily on Taiwan and maybe even China, and so people are trying to onshore things to the United States. And so this is something that's very interesting. Raimondo has been at the head of kind of this government-led initiative to boost America's semiconductor production capacities and capabilities.

6:01And I think this is making a pretty strategic alignment with OpenAI's objectives, obviously, to increase these capacities so there can be more adoption of AI. And then that's obviously just going to make them more money and grow their company as well. So I think the push for kind of an expanded manufacturing base comes right now is there's a bunch of concerns within the AI and also the cloud computing sectors over, we essentially have a bunch of big bottlenecks, right? So of course, the most notable that everyone talks about is how hard it is to get your hands on NVIDIA's graphics, the GPUs pretty much.

6:31And then also what a lot of people are talking about, and Sam Altman has talked about this a lot, but is what they're calling kind of this like looming energy crisis, where essentially these AI models use so much energy to run. And I mean, as is, you know, people are really focusing on switching to renewable energy and whatnot. But like, regardless of if you're switching to renewable energy, or you're trying to get off of coal, or whatever your, you know, ideologies with, or you just think it doesn't matter, I'm just going to burn more gas, like whatever your ideas around energy is, if AI scales the way that OpenAI believes it will, there is not enough energy being generated.

7:05So Sam Altman has invested into like a bunch of nuclear fusion investments. He believes this is the future. Now, fusion is a little tricky because the technology is maybe not all the way there, but nuclear definitely, in my opinion, is the solution to all of these problems. It is probably the fastest way we can scale up. This is a technology that we've had for quite a long time. If we can get over some of the political hurdles, maybe people's, you know, fears, some of the bad PR around nuclear. I think nuclear is the way that we could instantly scale off and make a ton of very cheap energy that could really see this vision come to life and perhaps increase the global standard of living around the world.

7:44So OpenAI's vision right now is more than just this manufacturing, you know, capabilities. This is what everyone's kind of talking about, but I think right now it's actually a paradigm shift in global AI infrastructure development, but also like energy infrastructure development. Like this will not be possible. Like I mentioned without way more energy. So all of this is spearheaded by this huge initiative. It's going to be incredible to see if he's able to pull this off, how much money he's able to raise and what that looks like in the future. So I'll keep you up to date on everything that's happening and how much money he is able to raise, what he's actually able to do, how this initiative goes forward, all of the different things you need to know and all the different partners he has.

8:21I'll keep you up to date on all of it.