OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has embarked on a fresh global campaign to secure financing and supply-chain partners capable of meeting the company’s explosive demand for computing power.
In recent weeks, Altman has traveled across Asia — visiting Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan — and is now preparing to meet investors in the United Arab Emirates, The Wall Street Journal reports.
People familiar with the discussions say the goal is to lock in long-term, low-cost partnerships for OpenAI’s next phase of growth, including a sweeping, multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure expansion.
The campaign comes as Altman revives talks with key chip and data-center manufacturers that once doubted his ambition. During a similar tour in early 2024, some executives balked at his pitch to build $7 trillion worth of AI infrastructure, questioning the economics of AI services at the time. One of them, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSM) chief executive C.C. Wei, was blunt.
“Too aggressive for me to believe.”
But this time, the tone has changed. Altman’s meetings with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Foxconn, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Hitachi have drawn warmer responses, reflecting a market now driven by AI euphoria and record chip valuations.
A pivotal factor has been OpenAI’s deepening alliance with Nvidia. The two companies recently announced a plan for Nvidia to lease up to five million of its AI chips to OpenAI and invest as much as $100 billion to deliver the computing infrastructure required to train and deploy future models.
The partnership has lifted shares of chip suppliers worldwide and bolstered confidence in Altman’s broader vision: to build a distributed factory model for AI computation spanning continents.
In a recent blog post, Altman outlined OpenAI’s long-term goals.
“Our vision is simple: we want to create a factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week. The execution of this will be extremely difficult; it will take us years to get to this milestone, and it will require innovation at every level of the stack, from chips to power to buildings to robotics. But we have been hard at work on this and believe it is possible.”
That ambition is now supported by a web of new partnerships. Samsung and SK Hynix have agreed to co-develop AI data centers in South Korea to meet projected demand that could reach 900,000 wafers a month — more than double the current global capacity for high-bandwidth memory.
In Japan, OpenAI and Hitachi plan to collaborate on power transmission equipment and data-center infrastructure, while the UAE’s MGX and Mubadala investment funds are in talks to finance projects, including the Stargate super-data center in Abu Dhabi.
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