OpenAI may lose $5 billion this year? Rumor has it that it will give up building its own fab and turn over chip production to TSMC

2024-07-26 10:58

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Original title: "OpenAI may lose 5 billion US dollars this year, "burning out cash"? It is said that it has given up building its own wafer fab and handed over the production of chips to TSMC"

Original author: Natalia Wu, BlockTempo

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence giant and ChatGPT developer, was exposed by Information yesterday (25) that it may face the risk of losing 5 billion US dollars this year.

The report quoted OpenAI's internal financial documents and insiders, saying that OpenAI spent nearly 7 billion US dollars on the training cost of AI models alone, and will spend another 1.5 billion US dollars on human costs, far exceeding the expenditure of competitors such as Amazon-backed Anthropic (the AI startup that developed Claude). (Anthropic expects to burn more than $2.7 billion in cash in 2024)

OpenAI faces the risk of running out of cash?

Information estimates that OpenAI, which has a latest valuation of $80 billion, will need to complete another round of financing in the next 12 months to improve its balance sheet, otherwise it may be at risk of running out of cash with a loss of $5 billion this year.

According to Tracxn data, OpenAI has now completed 7 rounds of financing and raised more than $11.3 billion in funds. The most recent one was a private financing in April with ARK Investment Management, led by female stock god Cathie Wood, and the amount of financing was not disclosed.

This means that although OpenAI is one of the fastest growing companies in history, it may also be one of the companies with the fastest growing operating costs. As of press time, OpenAI has not yet publicly responded to this revelation.

Extended reading: 《Sam Altman raises $7 billion to build ten semiconductor plants, entrusting TSMC to manage production throughout the process》

OpenAI CEO will not build a wafer plant, and will hand over production to TSMC

It is also worth noting that last week Information also reported that in order to reduce dependence on external purchases of Nvidia chips, the original plan was to raise $7 trillion to establish a joint venture to build multiple wafer plants.

But after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman negotiated with Taiwan semiconductor giant TSMC, it seems that the idea of building its own fab has been abandoned. Instead, it has established a joint venture company focusing on chip design, and the production of AI chips will be entrusted to TSMC.

It is understood that OpenAI is currently in talks with chip designers including Broadcom on the design of new AI chips, and it is also reported that it has approached Taiwanese companies such as Alchip. Sources expect that the performance of OpenAI's self-made AI chips will be similar to NVIDIA products, but it is expected to be available at least until 2026.