OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Unveils 'Gigawatt-a-Week' AI Factory Plan to End Compute Shortage

In a new blog post titled "Abundant Intelligence," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has revealed an ambitious plan to solve a major challenge facing the future of artificial intelligence: a lack of computing power. Altman says that his core vision is to build a "factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week."

“We want to create a factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week. The execution of this will be extremely difficult; it will take us years to get to this milestone and it will require innovation at every level of the stack, from chips to power to building to robotics,” he wrote in his blog post. 

This massive project, which Altman calls potentially "the coolest and most important infrastructure project ever," is designed to keep up with the astonishing growth of AI services. To give a sense of scale, a single gigawatt is an immense amount of power, enough to supply hundreds of thousands of homes. By building new infrastructure at this pace, the goal is to make AI computing so commonplace that it is no longer a limiting factor for progress.

“In our opinion, it will be the coolest and most important infrastructure project ever. We are particularly excited to build a lot of this in the US; right now, other countries are building things like chips fabs and new energy production much faster than we are, and we want to help turn that tide.”

Altman believes that this kind of power is needed to tackle humanity's biggest problems. For example, he suggests that with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI could help cure cancer or provide a personal tutor to every student in the world. He states that without this infrastructure, society would be forced to choose which important problems to solve.

The blog post admits that achieving this goal will be "extremely difficult" and will take years. It will require major breakthroughs in everything from computer chips and power sources to building new robotic systems. Altman also notes that he is particularly focused on building this new infrastructure in the United States to help the country keep up with other nations. He plans to share more details about the partners and how the project will be paid for in the coming months.

“Over the next couple of months, we’ll be talking about some of our plans and the partners we are working with to make this a reality. Later this year, we’ll talk about how we are financing it; given how increasing compute is the literal key to increasing revenue, we have some interesting new ideas.”

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