Sam Altman Seeks Global Partnerships to Fund OpenAI Infrastructure Plan

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is on a global fundraising and supply-chain campaign to secure financing and manufacturing partners for the company's multitrillion-dollar infrastructure plan. Altman is exploring financing alternatives with supply-chain partners to meet OpenAI's demand for computing capacity. Discussions are in the early stages.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has embarked on a global fundraising and supply-chain campaign to secure financing and manufacturing partners for the company's multitrillion-dollar infrastructure plan. Altman is exploring financing alternatives with supply-chain partners to meet OpenAI's demand for computing capacity, with discussions in the early stages.

Since late September, Altman has traveled to Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan to accelerate the world's artificial intelligence chip-building capacity. He has met with companies including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), Foxconn, Samsung, and SK Hynix. Altman is pushing these companies, many of which are suppliers of the AI chip designer Nvidia, to increase production capacity and give priority to OpenAI's orders.

Altman's trip also includes a planned visit to investors in the United Arab Emirates to raise money for OpenAI's infrastructure expansion and research. The computing supply chain has faced manufacturing bottlenecks as it tries to meet surging global demand. TSMC, the world's largest chip manufacturer, produces chips for Nvidia while Foxconn assembles the servers using those chips. South Korea's Samsung and SK Hynix provide memory chips for such systems.

The renewed confidence in OpenAI came from its blockbuster deal with Nvidia, in which the chip giant agreed to lease up to five million of its AI chips to the ChatGPT maker over time and invest up to $100 billion to make it happen. The announcement helped bolster Altman's vision for computing power and lifted the stocks of chip suppliers across the world.

OpenAI's recent video-generation model, Sora 2, released Tuesday, has revived global enthusiasm. Industry participants expect that such models and applications would drive up demand for computing power much more aggressively than text-based models. Altman's vision is to create a factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week.

The company recently told its investors and business partners that it was likely to spend around $16 billion in renting computing servers this year, and that the expenditure could rise to around $400 billion in 2029. OpenAI and Nvidia have also announced plans to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia's computing systems for OpenAI to train and run its next generation of models.