OpenAI CEO Plans Billions Of Investment For Global Semiconductor Factory

JAKARTA - OpenAI CEO Sam Altman plans to use billions of dollars he seeks for a chip project to establish a network of factories that will produce semiconductors. This was reported by Bloomberg News on Friday, January 19, citing sources familiar with the plan.

Altman has been in talks with a number of large potential investors in hopes of raising huge funds to build a chip fabrication plant, which is generally known as a fabs. This project will involve cooperation with leading chipmakers, and thefabs network will scale globally.

The chip manufacturing process requires a high cost, and requires a large amount of natural resources, apart from billions of dollars in funding. This cost continues to increase along with technological advances to make the chips used in artificial intelligence applications.

"The G42 based in Abu Dhabi and SoftBank Group from Japan are several companies that have held talks with the OpenAI boss, although talks are still in the early stages and the full list of partners and financiers has not been established," the report said.

Talks with G42, which collaborated with the ChatGPT maker in October last year, focused solely on raising around $8 billion (IDR 124.9 trillion) to 10 billion US dollars (IDR 156.19 trillion) although the current status of the talks is unclear.

Intel, chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), and Samsung Electronics are some potential partners for OpenAI, the report added.

The Bloomberg report said that Altman returned to OpenAI in November following the sudden sacking that rocked the tech industry. The report states that Altman has worked hard on chip projects until he is temporarily out, and upon his return, he revived the effort.

Microsoft has also been talked to about this plan, and the software company is interested.