OpenAI, the ChatGPT maker led by Sam altman, is stepping up large-scale infrastructure deals with technology giants, including AMD, NVIDIA, Oracle, Samsung and CoreWeave.
These contracts give the company access to more than 20 gigawatt hours of computing power, equivalent to the output of 20 nuclear reactors with a total value of about $1 trillion.
OpenAI has recently signed a multi-year chip supply deal with AMD, providing 6-gigawatt computing capabilities and expected to bring billions of dollars to the chip maker in the coming years.
The deal involved AMD giving OpenAI 10% of its stake in a partnership to cooperate in developing the next generation of AI GPUs.
In response to the partnership, on CNBC's Squawk Box program, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang was asked if he knew about the AMD-openAI deal.
He admitted that he not really knew and was surprised that AMD gave OpenAI a 10% stake to receive support from the ChatGPT maker in developing the next generation of AI GPUs.
In contrast, the relationship between NVIDIA and OpenAI is completely different. The world's most valuable company has invested directly in OpenAI, becoming a shareholder of Sam altman's AI startup.
Although OpenAI has used NVIDIA's hardware for many years, Huang said the current deal marks the first time NVIDIA has directly sold a product to OpenAI.
Huang explained that selling products directly is a step in a long-term strategy to turn OpenAI into a self-storage super-scale company, meaning it owns and operates its own data centers.
As Huang commented on the deal on CNBC, CEO Sam Altman also shared in Andreessen Horowitz's a16z podcast that OpenAI will continue to expand infrastructure deals, strengthening its leadership in AI.
We have decided to invest heavily in infrastructure, Altman said, and to do this on a large scale, we need the support of the entire industry or at least a large part of the industry.
Although OpenAI's revenue has not reached 1,000 billion USD, altman believes that huge infrastructure investments will bring long-term profits.
If you are building the biggest data center in human history, you have to be willing to do something different, altman said.
These agreements demonstrate OpenAI's ambition to expand its computing power and strengthen its leadership in the global AI field.
