Was NVIDIA’s $100 Billion Investment In OpenAI’s AI A Hallucination?

Five Months On The Deal Has Yet To Be Made

Our least favourite RAM devourer announced a $100 billion investment deal with NVIDIA last September, but no money or products have changed hands as far as Ars Technica or anyone else can tell.  NVIDIA have gone on record stating the $100 billion figure was never committed to, it was more of an aspiration or rough estimate.  There are likely several reasons for the delay, not least of which is the power required to expand OpenAI’s infrastructure with the new NVIDIA hardware.  The original plan mentioned up to 10 gigawatts of new NVIDIA systems for OpenAI, which would require quite a few new power stations to be built.  The problem is that the rapid growth of the AI industry has severely impacted the availability of the specialized parts required to build out a new traditional power plant.  The lead time to build a new nuclear power station is also quite lengthy, certainly not something you can build in five months.

There are also rumours that OpenAI isn’t in love with the speed at which NVIDIA hardware handles inference tasks and even that Jensen Huang has concerns about OpenAI’s business approach.  Neither of these rumours have been validated, indeed Jensun has straight out denied his concerns during an interview.  The deal is still on, according to both NVIDIA and OpenAI, it’s just unlikely to be quite as large it was originally estimated to be.  

The reduction is still not likely to help us poor enthusiasts get our hands on reasonably priced DDR5 nor NVIDIA GPUs though.