OpenAI CEO Sam Altman may have the ear of seemingly every venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, but executives from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) are far less impressed. Per a New York Times report from earlier this week, TSMC’s leadership dismissed Altman as a “podcasting bro” and scoffed at his proposed $7 trillion plan to build 36 new chip manufacturing plants and AI data centers.
The news comes after Altman’s ill-fated PR tour of Asian chip manufacturers last winter when he met with Samsung and SK Hynix, in addition to TSMC, in search of investment for OpenAI’s artificial general intelligence goals. According to the Times, TSMC’s senior leadership derided Altman after his $7 trillion (that’s trillion with a “T”) request.
While Altman has not officially confirmed his pursuit of chipmaking capabilities, his apparent vision would eventually enable OpenAI to compete directly with both Nvidia and TSMC with in-house designed and fabricated chipsets. Reportedly, the investment would be spread across several years as the fabrication capacity is built out. But TSMC executives openly questioned how they would be able to mitigate the financial risks associated with such a plan.
This isn’t the first time that TSMC has thrown shade at OpenAI. During its 2024 Annual Shareholders Meeting, TSMC founder and CEO Dr. C. C. Wei characterized Altman as “too aggressive, too aggressive for me to believe.”
OpenAI has no shortage of potential investors, mind you. The company received $13 billion from Microsoft in 2023 and is reportedly closing in on another $6.5 billion round of funding that could close by the end of next week. The company is also rumored to be planning to effectively abandon its nonprofit business for a for-profit structure in an effort to make itself more attractive to investors.
According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, despite OpenAI’s stated $4 billion annual income, the company is losing nearly double that amount ($7 billion) every year. The fact that OpenAI’s C-suite has become a revolving door of executives abandoning the company (CTO Mira Murati, CRO Bob McGrew, and senior research executive Barret Zoph, all resigned earlier this week) surely will not help assuage investors’ concerns either.
