On Sunday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pitched a $7.00 trillion initiative to expand the global AI chip production capacity.
Altman stressed that the lack of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips limits generative AI (GenAI) technology advancement. Moreover, the Wall Street Journal reported that the supergroup intends to scale and interconnect AI infrastructure globally.
The supergroup includes the US and UAE governments, Microsoft, Taiwan Semiconductor, SoftBank, and several other industry players. They will work together to construct dozens of large-scale AI chip factories, data centers, and power generation facilities.
According to Altman’s vision, OpenAI, the Chat Generative Pre-training Transformer (ChatGPT) creator, will make AI a global ubiquity. Insiders claimed on Friday that OpenAI hit $2.00 billion in revenue in December but nearly exhausted its AI Chip inventories.
Furthermore, the Financial Times reported that the company expects to exceed $4.00 billion in monthly revenue by 2025. OpenAI’s confidence comes from the soaring AI demand, with an estimated market size of $67.41 billion in 2024.
In addition, analysts project the industry to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 39.73% to $501.81 billion by 2031. Thus, the AI chip scarcity must be solved so tech companies can scale the training of large language models.
AI Chip Projections Too Low for OpenAI CEO
OpenAI estimated that total global AI chip production, including semiconductors and in-house output, would not reach $1.00 trillion until 2030. Sam Altman added that OpenAI plans to invest $100.00 billion in manufacturing its own chips.
Additionally, tech giants, including Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Amazon, have begun designing and producing AI chips. Nevertheless, Altman Insisted that output is nowhere near enough to satisfy the growth potential of GenAI technologies.
Meanwhile, skeptics criticized the OpenAI CEO’s $7.00 billion target as outlandish and unrealistic. It surpasses the economies of Germany and the UK combined and the added market values of Microsoft and Apple.
Lastly, $7.00 billion is nearly 14 times the current value of the entire global semiconductor industry.
