OpenAI finance chief sees firm selling AI data centre services to offset ChatGPT costs
The start-up also generated US$1 billion in revenue in July, marking its first month hitting that milestone, finance chief Sarah Friar says
The service would be loosely inspired by the success Amazon.com found renting out its spare cloud computing capacity to companies, OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar said in an interview Wednesday.
OpenAI was not “actively looking” at such an effort today because it was focused on securing computing capacity for its own operations, she said, but “I do think about it as a business down the line, for sure.”
In recent years, OpenAI has gained expertise on how to design and set up data centres to optimise workloads for AI. The company now sees an opportunity to capitalise on that know-how. It also wants to become more directly involved in the process rather than rely solely on third-party vendors.
“If all we do is buy from others, all we’re doing is giving them our IP because they’re learning how to build AI infrastructure,” Friar said.
OpenAI has raised tens of billions of dollars to pay for advanced chips and data centres to build and operate cutting-edge AI services. The company is also working with SoftBank Group and Oracle on an ambitious infrastructure venture called Stargate, with plans to build massive data centres in the US and abroad.