What Sam Altman gets up to matters. Others at OpenAI, among them chief technology officer Greg Brockman and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, may have played a greater technical role in the development of ChatGPT. But the firm’s co-founder and chief executive is the face of not only OpenAI’s ambition, but the commercialisation of artificial intelligence (AI) writ large.
So when it emerges that Altman is courting Middle Eastern investors and semiconductor fabricators to develop an AI chip venture, people pay attention. Even then, ambition has boundaries. If reports are accurate, the project is looking to raise as much as $7tn (£5.5tn). Not a typo.
For context – if context can be applied to this sort of scale – $7tn is the combined annual gross domestic product of Japan and the UK. It’s $3tn more than the ‘dry powder’ on the balance sheets of the entire private capital industry, per BlackRock estimates. Nothing in the history of project finance comes remotely close to this sort of fundraising.