OpenAI is allegedly working on mass-producing its own AI chip starting 2026

The featured image was created using DALL-E and it’s not the actual image of the chip.

OpenAI has big plans to create their own AI chip and it seems that Project Stargate is moving fast. As reported by Reuters, according to their sources, Open AI will finalize the design for its first in-house chip in the next few months and they plan to start manufacturing at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) 

That means that next year, we will have news about the new AI chip because typically if everything goes well, the process takes around 6 months from design to starting the manufacturing.

The ChatGPT maker has certainly prepared for this step for a long time and has been hired massively recently. The main asset of OpenAI in this domain is Richard Ho, who was the Google TPU head and is a reputable chip engineer.

According to Reuters, the whole chip design and preparation process for a single chip would cost approximately $500 million. The entire investment budget for Project Stargate is projected at $500 billion. We don’t know at this point if the chip is one of the investments of the project but it’s likely to be.

In the meantime, The Wall Street Journal has reported that a team of investors led by Elon Musk has offered $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit company controlling OpenAI.

Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO has responded promptly on X saying that he’s not interested in the offer and he made a counteroffer to buy Twitter (now X) for $9.74 billion.

Just for fun, I asked ChatGPT what is the value of Open AI and I got the following answer:

However, the OpenAI board has not officially responded to Musk’s offer yet.

Going back to the chip manufacturing process, OpenAI’s choice for TSMC is a clear one to keep the whole process inside the U.S. TSMC has a 130,000 sq ft wafer plant in Washington with another one being built in Arizona.

It’s exciting to see how this story will unfold, but it’s unlikely that OpenAI will be bought at this stage.

What do you think about OpenAI creating its own AI chip? Let’s talk about this in the comments below.