OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s ongoing effort to fund a new initiative to produce chips to power artificial intelligence has graduated from a billion-dollar venture to a trillion dollar undertaking that aims at nothing less than “to reshape the business of chips and AI,” per recent reports. The United Arab Emirates has joined the list of sources of potential funding for the global project, which seeks to remedy the tight supply of AI chips that Altman is said to view as an obstacle to OpenAI’s effort to develop artificial general intelligence, which he defines as “systems that are generally smarter than humans.”

Another definition is machines with human-level cognitive abilities — the ability to adapt, reason and solve problems across different domains rather than limited areas of focus. Even within that more modest parameter, projections for achieving AGI range from years to decades to a century.

In a blog post from February 2023, Altman offered his definition of AGI, which he also calls superintelligence, and offered advice for “things we think are important to do now to prepare for AGI.” Foremost, “as we create successively more powerful systems, we want to deploy them and gain experience with operating them in the real world” across various use-cases.

A shortage of the GPU chips that currently power AI models has driven up prices, limiting the ability to develop and deploy increasingly intelligent AI, which seems largely the reason Altman has spent the past year raising funds for his chip proliferation goal.

“The project could require raising as much as $5 trillion to $7 trillion,” The Wall Street Journal reports in its latest article on Altman’s project. The funding goal faces “significant obstacles,” according to WSJ, which says “such a sum of investment would dwarf the current size of the global semiconductor industry.”

The worldwide global semiconductor industry had global sales of $527 billion in 2023 and is projected to hit $1 trillion by 2030. “Global sales of semiconductor manufacturing equipment — the costly machinery needed to run chip factories — last year were $100 billion, according to an estimate by the industry group SEMI,” WSJ notes.

Last week, “Altman posted on X that OpenAI believes ‘the world needs more AI infrastructure — fab capacity, energy, data centers, etc. — than people are currently planning to build,’” writes CNBC. “Building massive-scale AI infrastructure, and a resilient supply chain, is crucial to economic competitiveness,” which OpenAI hopes to fuel.

Altman’s remarks and the news surrounding his fundraising efforts “follows some controversy over some of Altman’s previous chip endeavors and investments,” CNBC says, explaining that “just before Altman’s brief ouster as CEO of OpenAI, he was reportedly seeking billions for a new and not-yet-formed chip venture code-named ‘Tigris’ to eventually compete with Nvidia, traveling to the Middle East to raise money from investors.”

Last month, it was reported that in addition to Intel, G42 of Abu Dhabi, Japan’s SoftBank Group and Taiwan’s TSMC were potential investors and/or operational partners.

Altman has also engaged members of Congress in discussions about “increasing the world’s supply of advanced computer chips” as well as “where and how to build new semiconductor factories, known in the industry as ‘fabs,’” according to The Washington Post.