Legendary chip architect Jim Keller responds to Sam Altman's plan to raise $7 trillion to make AI chips — 'I can do it for less than $1 trillion'

Reports say that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman plans to raise $5 to $7 trillion to build a network of fabs to produce enough chips for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, raising many eyebrows in the industry. Nvidia's Jensen Huang said that the architectural innovation of AI processors is more important than the quantity of these processors. Now, Jim Keller, a legendary CPU developer who now works at Tenstorrent developing AI and HPC processors, essentially claims the same thing.

"I can do it for less than $1 trillion," Keller wrote in a quote tweet in response to Altman's tweet that says "f* it why not 8" in an apparent reference to raising the fundraising amount to 8 trillion.

Altman's plan to raise trillions of dollars and build enough AI processors for all workloads and emerging AI companies is very ambitious. Still, it essentially involves a radical expansion of the semiconductor supply chain, which could lead to overcapacity at foundries and devaluation of these processors on the market. But instead of building more chips for AI, both Keller and Nvidia CEO Huang say that these processors (see our list of best CPUs) must get more sophisticated. Furthermore, the supply chain of AI hardware has to get simpler to reduce the costs of AI servers and other devices.

"Start by eliminating the margin stacking," wrote Keller, implying the cost or profit margin added by each participant in the supply chain to deliver a product to the end user. "There are two–three layers. Then, make chips way faster so the hardware matches the software. That is harder but doable."

Tenstorrent itself has a very ambitious roadmap that involves the development of processors for AI and HPC applications. Each AI processor in the roadmap increases the number of processing units, and the units become more advanced, improving their performance efficiency. Yet, demand for AI performance is growing fast, so only time will tell whether Tenstorrent and other companies will catch up with it in the foreseeable future.

Altman's fundraising goal of $5 trillion to $7 trillion far exceeds the present valuation of the worldwide semiconductor industry, which recorded sales of $527 billion last year and is anticipated to hit the $1 trillion mark by 2030. Meanwhile, chip manufacturers invested $99.5 billion in chip fabrication equipment in 2022 and are projected to allocate $97 billion for fabrication tools this year.