Technology

These numbers don't make any sense to me, as the hed is about buying lots of chips, and the body is about power use. No matter how you slice it, $8.76/kWh is a terrible fucking investment ... if that's chip-inclusive, that's another story.

Still, the audacity of saying "we're going to invest $1 trillion" is Dr. Evil-level humour.

OpenAI is signing about $1 trillion (€940 billion) in deals this year for computing power to keep its artificial intelligence dreams humming.

On Monday the outfit inked a deal with AMD which follows earlier tie-ups with Nvidia, Oracle and CoreWeave, as Sam Altman’s outfit scrambles to secure enough silicon to keep ChatGPT online and the hype machine alive.

The latest commitments would give OpenAI access to more than 20 gigawatts of computing capacity over the next decade, roughly the output of 20 nuclear reactors. At about $50 billion per gigawatt, according to OpenAI’s estimates, the total tab hits that $1 trillion figure.

Analysts are not convinced this financial engineering makes any sense. DA Davidson analyst Gil Luria said: “OpenAI is in no position to make any of these commitments,” adding that it could lose about $10 billion this year.