When the AI Chips Are Down, $7T Is All You Need

🌏 In this week’s episode of ‘As the AI World Turns’ we find OpenAI’s Sam Altman seeking $7 trillion (yes, TRILLION) to buy into the AI chip game.

As we learned in last week’s edition, Big Tech players are clamoring to build their own AI chips due to a lack of supply and Nvidia’s high price tag for the most powerful ones on the market.

The ever-ambitious Altman is wheeling and dealing for an eye-popping sum of investment with the likes of the U.A.E government, Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), which makes about 90% of the world’s most powerful chips.

The deal he seeks includes securing power supply, amid growing concerns over the lack of juice available to operate the data centers where AI computational magic happens.

A quote from the CEO of DataBank, a data center operator in a recent article from The Information: There isn’t enough power to accommodate the AI chips in many big data center markets.”

This also raises the volume on AI sustainability concerns given data centers run on both dirty and clean energy, something I talked about last week on a panel at the World AI Cannes Festival (thank you, again, Mara Pometti for inviting me).

Altman’s endeavor sounds like a pipe dream, but I can’t ever count this guy out.