OpenAI hopes to break AI's reliance on Nvidia by using investment from UAE to make its own chips

pcgamer.com:

OpenAI is working with a UAE investment firm, to create a deal in which the artificial intelligence research group gets all the money it needs to design and manufacture its own AI acceleration processors. With Nvidia currently dominating the market and its H100 chips in short supply around the world, OpenAI is clearly looking to join Amazon and Google in having full control over its own AI capabilities and future.

That's according to a report by the Financial Times (via Tom's Hardware), although rather unsurprisingly, there's not much in the way of specific details such as the amount of investment being discussed or the timeframe for the chip development.

Back in February it was announced OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, wanted to expand the global production of AI chips, and was chasing trillions of dollars in funding from the UAE to make that happen. His estimates apparently placed the figure at between $5 trillion and $7 trillion, quite the ask.

When asked by the UAE's AI minister how many GPUs it could buy for $7 trillion, Jen-Hsun Huang is reported to have responded with «Apparently, all the GPUs.»

Even if OpenAI outsourced the design and testing of an AI processor to a third party, it would still need to find a manufacturer capable of producing chips to the required quality and quantity. All of that could take years and in the meantime, OpenAI would still have to rely on AMD, Intel, and Nvidia for relevant chips.

But I can't imagine that MGX, the UAE investment firm in question, is unaware of this, as the company's chairman is Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who also chairs another AI development firm, and acts as the national security adviser for UAE. The country is especially keen on putting itself front and centre in the world of AI investment and has a dedicated funding system in place for such ventures.

All of the big tech companies have AI as being their number one focus at the moment, at least as far marketing goes, but pretty much every new processor that's