After signing deals to use computer chips from Nvidia and AMD, OpenAI plans to design and deploy its own chips as it spends hundreds of billions of dollars building new computer data centers.
The maker of ChatGPT said on Monday that it would build new chips with Broadcom, a chipmaker based in San Jose, Calif. Beginning in the second half of next year, the two companies plan to deploy enough chips to consume 10 gigawatts of electricity, an amount that could power millions of households.
OpenAI previously said it would deploy enough Nvidia and AMD chips to consume 16 gigawatts of power.
“Developing our own accelerators adds to the broader ecosystem of partners all building the capacity required to push the frontier of A.I.,” OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, said in a statement.
The company’s agreement with Broadcom is the latest in a series of deals it has made with various partners as it works to build data centers across the globe. OpenAI is already building a facility in Abilene, Texas, and plans additional data centers in other parts of Texas, New Mexico, Ohio and in the Midwest.
OpenAI is among many tech companies that are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the construction of new data centers for artificial intelligence. OpenAI, Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft plan to spend more than $325 billion combined on these facilities by the end of this year alone.
Nvidia, the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, dominates the market for chips used to power A.I. technologies like ChatGPT. But many companies are now designing chips that aim to challenge its dominance, including tech giants like Google and Amazon, venerable chipmakers like AMD and start-ups like Cerebras and Groq.
Google also partners with Broadcom in designing its A.I. chips.
OpenAI’s agreements with Nvidia and AMD also provided the start-up with capital needed to build its data centers. Nvidia said it intended to invest $100 billion in the start-up, while AMD agreed to essentially give the company 160 million shares of AMD stock, which could amount to 10 percent of the chipmaker.
Broadcom is not investing in OpenAI or providing stock to the start-up. By designing its own chips, OpenAI can reduce its dependence on chipmakers like Nvidia and AMD and gain more leverage as it negotiates agreements with those companies.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
Cade Metz is a Times reporter who writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology.
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