When we first heard that OpenAI's head, Sam Altman, was looking to build a chip venture, we were impressed but considered it as another standard case of a company adopting custom silicon instead of using off-the-shelf processors. However, his reported meetings with potential investors to reportedly raise $5 to $7 trillion to build a network of fabs for AI chips is extreme given that the entire world's semiconductor industry is estimated to be around $1 trillion per year. Nvidia's Jensen Huang doesn't believe that much investment is needed to build an alternative semiconductor supply chain just for AI. Instead, the industry needs to continue its GPU architecture innovations to continue improving performance — in fact, Huang claims that Nvidia has already increased AI performance 1 million fold over the last ten years.
"If you just assume that that computers never get any faster you might come to the conclusion [that] we need 14 different planets and three different galaxies and four more Suns to fuel all this," said Jensen Huang at the World Government Summit.
