Altman scours globe for funds, compute

OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman has embarked on a global fundraising and supply-chain campaign, seeking financing and manufacturing partners that can help meet the startup's insatiable demand for computing capacity.

- Raffaele Huang & Berber Jin

In a bid to secure long-term, low-cost supplies for OpenAI's staggering, multitrillion-dollar infrastructure plan, Altman has been exploring financing alternatives with supply-chain partners, people familiar with his meetings said. Such discussions remain in the early stages, the people said.

Since late September, the head of the ChatGPT maker has traveled to Taiwan, South Korea and Japan to accelerate the world's artificial intelligence chip-building capacity. He has met with companies including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Foxconn as well as Samsung and SK Hynix, the people said. Altman was pushing these companies, many of which are suppliers of the AI chip designer Nvidia, to increase production capacity and give priority to OpenAI's orders, the people said.

He has planned to visit investors in the United Arab Emirates to raise money to help fund OpenAI's infrastructure expansion and research, according to people familiar with the plan.

Since the introduction of ChatGPT, the computing supply chain has faced manufacturing bottlenecks as it tries to meet surging global demand. TSMC, the world's largest chip manufacturer, produces chips for Nvidia while Foxconn assembles the servers using those chips. South Korea's Samsung and SK Hynix provide memory chips for such systems.