OpenAI looking at producing AI chips in-house: Report

OpenAI reportedly weighed up a chip making firm as an acquisition target so it could produce its own AI chips.

OpenAI, the company behind artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, is reportedly exploring the possibility of manufacturing processing chips in-house amid a global shortage of the expensive and difficult to produce hardware.

An Oct. 5 Reuters report citing people familiar with the matter said OpenAI has even evaluated an unnamed company as a potential target for an acquisition to help with its AI chip making ambitions.

The company has not yet decided if it will move on the acquisition. OpenAI has also been internally discussing a number of other options to address the current chip shortage.

Beside building its own chips, the options include working more closely with its current primary chip supplier NVIDIA and diversifying chip suppliers beyond its current providers.

Earlier this year, OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman complained to a room full of AI developers that chip shortages were delaying his company’s progress, according to a now-deleted blog post written by Raza Habib, the CEO of AI firm Humanloop.

“A common theme that came up throughout the discussion was that currently OpenAI is extremely GPU-limited and this is delaying a lot of their short-term plans,” Habib wrote.

If OpenAI does proceed with the reported plan to manufacture its own chips, it will join a small group of tech industry heavyweights, including Google and Amazon, that moved chip production in-house.

Since the public launch of ChatGPT in November last year the demand for specialized AI chips has skyrocketed.

The ensuing wave of demand has seen NVIDIA’s share price surge as companies looking to build AI applications clamor to purchase the costly computing hardware.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to Cointelgraph’s request for comment.

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