OpenAI could be entering the hardware market soon. The San Francisco company is reportedly prepping to launch its own AI-chip in 2026.
This would allow it to reduce its reliance on Nvidia and AMD chips to train and run its large language models, such as GPT, which as you may know powers ChatGPT. It's not just them, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta are all working on their own AI chips. On the consumer side of things, Neural Processing Units (NPUs) are already a part in many computers. Experts believe that in a few years, most PCs that are sold will be an AI PC.
Now, this is not the first time we have heard about OpenAI's plans about an artificial intelligence chip. Some leaks from last year suggested that OpenAI had chosen Broadcom to co-develop its in-house AI chip. Once the designs were ready, they would be sent to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) for fabrication, i.e., to manufacture OpenAI's AI chips next year. OpenAI had hired former Google TPU engineer, Richard Ho, to lead its hardware division. Ho is spearheading the chip design team, which had been expanded from 20 members to 40 in February this year. This clearly indicated things were speeding up.
The Verge quotes a recent article published by the Financial Times, which said that its sources told it that OpenAI has partnered with Broadcom to produce its chips. These chips would be used internally to power its services, and not sold to customers. A day later, a report by Reuters said that Broadcom landed a $10 billion AI chip order from a new customer. While Broadcom did not name the customer, market analysts believe that it is none other than OpenAI.
OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, recently mentioned on X, that the company would be "doubling our compute fleet over the next 5 months". This was a reference to the growing need for GPUs, as it continues to evolve its data hungry models. I suppose they need more powerful chips to more efficiently milk every last drop of data from users.
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