Reuters: OpenAI considers making its own AI chips

According to Reuters, OpenAI is investigating the possibilities of making its own AI chips. Now the company mainly uses Nvidia AI GPUs for this, but OpenAI is afraid of shortages and rising costs. The company is said to be considering an acquisition for its own AI chips.

In any case, the company has been working on various solutions for at least a year. Mentioned include closer collaborations with Nvidia and the search for other suppliers. The Reuters sources say that the company is also considering making AI chips itself.

No technical details are yet mentioned about those AI chips. In any case, the step towards self-production would require a lot of money; one industry source expects this would cost hundreds of millions of dollars annually and a lot of time. To speed up this process, OpenAI is said to be looking for a company to acquire. OpenAI is said to already have a takeover candidate in mind and has also investigated this company, but it is not clear which company it concerns.

OpenAI is not the first company to want to make AI chips itself. For example, Amazon acquired Annapurna Labs in 2015 to make AI chips. Microsoft itself is also said to be working on AI hardware that is now being tested by OpenAI.

In order to grow as a company and do faster and better generative AI processing, OpenAI needs AI hardware. Now it mainly uses Nvidia hardware, for example via a supercomputer from Microsoft that uses tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs. According to the news agency, the GPU manufacturer has eighty percent of the AI ​​chip market. The French market watchdog is reportedly investigating whether Nvidia is exhibiting anti-competitive behavior.