OpenAI allegedly wants TSMC 1.6nm for in-house AI chip debut

Source: The Register

OpenAI's first custom-designed silicon chips allegedly will be manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the same outfit churning out processors for Nvidia, Apple, AMD, Intel, and others.

OpenAI has reportedly explored investing in its own chip fabs to the tune of $7 trillion, but now those ambitions appear to have been scaled back. Instead of negotiating with TSMC to build a dedicated wafer factory. The AI model maker is believed to be pursuing the fabrication of its own machine-learning accelerating ASIC with the help of Broadcom and Marvell on a TSMC node.

OpenAI is said to be working on a funding deal that would see the company valued at $100 billion. The AI super-lab, which as of June had a reported annualized revenue of $3.4 billion, now says it has more than 200 million weekly active users of ChatGPT, double the number cited last November.

And it claims that 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies are using OpenAI's products to some degree. Also, API usage is said to have doubled since the release of GPT-4o mini in July. On the other hand, OpenAI took more than $10 billion in pledged support from Microsoft to get to this point, among other investments, and may dive $5 billion into the red this year due to its non-trivial neural net training and staff costs.

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