OpenAI is considering getting into the lucrative business of selling artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure services, and it plans to spend trillions of dollars to get there.
The service would approximate Amazon.com Inc.’s rental of spare cloud computing capacity to companies, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said Wednesday.
Friar was quick to point out that OpenAI is not “actively looking” at selling AI infrastructure now because it is actively focused on securing computing capacity for its own operations. But, she said, “I do think about it as a business down the line, for sure.”
The industry is at the dawn of a boom in the construction of AI infrastructure, she said, and AI is “voracious” for GPUs and compute. “It’s more like the railroads or the buildout of electricity than anything I’ve seen,” Friar told CNBC. “The internet, it turns out in hindsight, was actually a relatively capex-light buildout. I think we are just getting started.”
“The biggest thing we face is being constantly undercompute,” Friar added. “That’s why we launched Stargate (a $500 billion initiative to build massive data centers in the U.S. and abroad announced in January with SoftBank, Oracle, and others). That’s why we’re doing the bigger builds that you see with Microsoft, Oracle, CoreWeave, and so on. And we are just getting started.”
A new revenue stream like AI infrastructure will require a heavy investment, one that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seems all too eager to pursue. This month, Altman told reporters he expects the ChatGPT maker to “spend trillions of dollars” on data center construction in the “not very distant future,” and it is working to “design a very interesting new kind of financial instrument” to help support the effort. He did not provide details.
So far, OpenAI has raised billions of dollars to pay for data centers and advanced chips to build and operate AI models and services. The company eventually wants to leverage its expertise in designing and establishing data centers and become more directly involved in the process instead of leaning on third-party vendors.
“If all we do is buy from others, all we’re doing is giving them our IP because they’re learning how to build AI infrastructure,” Friar said.
Big Tech are throwing hundreds of billions of dollars into the construction of data centers and other infrastructure. Microsoft Corp. said it intends to spend $80 billion on AI data centers this fiscal year. Meta Platforms Inc. expects to invest up to $72 billion in AI-related operations in its fiscal year. Apple Inc. has pledged $600 billion on manufacturing projects in the U.S., most of them AI-focused, over the next several years.
