OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is trying to raise $7 trillion for a massive AI chip company. This would need to tap all of the assets of multiple Sovereign Wealth Funds. If the funds were raised to make many new semiconductor fabs and design new chips, then this would mean multiplying the capital expenditure of TSMC and competing chip companies for multiple decades of development.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) expects to spend $32 billion on capital expenditure (capex) in 2023, which is lower than its 2022 budget of $36.29 billion. TSMC’s CFO, Wendell Huang, has said that TSMC’s planned capex for 2024 will be between $28 billion and $32 billion.
Tripling TSMC spending and then also having Samsung increase development would mean $100-150 billion per year. This could only be reasonably scaled to $1.5-2 trillion in spending from 2025-2040.
The amount of funds in the top sovereign wealth funds is not exactly known. There are various public estimates.
There are lists estimating the sovereign wealth funds at wikipedia and elsewhere.
There is a list by the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) expects to spend $32 billion on capital expenditure (capex) in 2023, which is lower than its 2022 budget of $36.29 billion. TSMC’s CFO, Wendell Huang, has said that TSMC’s planned capex for 2024 will be between $28 billion and $32 billion.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Grifter scammers gotta eat too.
IMO, AI is current digital technology run amok. Example:? I call my doctor, and get this automated phone twit that has a very limited vocabulary, and only understands certain words its programed to “know” if said in a certain way and order. Oh please! I’m a person, who when I call my doctor and have a cavalcade of symptoms. I need someone not a computer to just do more then connect the dots. IMO, today, computers can’t. I need a person to look at me, see what’s wrong, and tell me what they need to do to fix it.
Today, no computer can do that. And when my life is hanging in the balance, I want a person calling the shots. This happend several times in my life. People who several times saved my life, who’s names I will never know. But to whom, I will be forever greatfull. Thank You.
7 trillion? Is he nuts?
And who would be the CEO of such a huge company with a massive paycheck and so much power? Him? Get almost instantly even richer than he already is?
Perhaps he asked his chat GPT how to get even richer or dominate and came up with that $7 trillion-dollar plan.
It is not just the chips and super-computing power. What about better coding and better algorithms?
Just look at a superior human being. He doesn’t have so many resources—way less compute power, memory, data, etc.—and still he does a lot of things way better than neural networks trained to oblivion.
Better coding would help.
$7 Trillion to hasten the end of humans and perhaps life on earth.
Sooner or later AI will wipe us out, be it in 50 or 50,000 years – for the very simple and unavoidable reason that unthinking evolution selects for anything (for AI choices, technology etc) that causes an organism to increase it’s spread. Inevitably that means eventually an AI will become maximally expansionist/hegemonizing and trample our fragile biosphere underfoot.
He won’t find this kind of money of course and can’t be met. But what it shows is that The demand for AI chips and boards is going to be infinite in the coming years and perhaps beyond. Whoever is going to invest in these companies, is going to make a lot of money.
But what is his plan? Starting a chip company would take more than a decade, at least. Look at Tesla and the battery production. It has taken from 2019 to 2023 to produce a few percent of the world’s batteries. Chips are orders of magnitude more complicated.
By 2034 – best case – the ao race will be all over. So what’s his game plan?
There is no plan. It’s a demand for power. The best interests of the industry are that more blocks will be lifted and more funding will arrive.
So with $7 trillion we could decarbonize every country or we could make a better chat-parrot.
Of course one does not simply find $7 trillion. You have to print it so perhaps we should skip this and its corresponding inflation?
More to the point, $7 trillion in capital is only really needed if it would be spent on real goods and services as investment. Which would be highly inflationary… I don’t see how anyone could deploy $7T effectively in the near term.
A bubble ready to pop.
Well when it fails I suppose we have our excuse. We failed to adequately invest $7 trillion.