OpenAI exec says company hopes to burn $50B of somebody else's money on compute this year

The Register · 2 months ago

OpenAI executive Greg Brockman testified in court that the company expects to spend $50 billion on computing power this year, with the funding coming from investments by Microsoft, Amazon, SoftBank, and others. Many of these investments are contingent on OpenAI purchasing compute resources from the investors themselves, such as Amazon's $35 billion pledge requiring OpenAI to rent two gigawatts of Trainium accelerators and deploy GPT models on AWS. The arrangement raises questions about whether OpenAI can actually sustain such spending levels or is primarily engaging in financial engineering to maintain momentum in the AI sector.