If your head is spinning after OpenAI’s recent flurry of megadeals, you’re not alone. Hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake — some of it promises future investment from Nvidia, some capital spending on data centres where construction has yet to start and some payments under a giant cloud computing contract with Oracle.
Look past the details of this spate of announcements, though, and there’s one overriding message: OpenAI is massively upping the ante. Weeks after the biggest tech companies increased their own capital spending plans, the company that started the generative AI gold rush wants everyone to know that it has put the first pieces in place for the biggest bet of all.
It all looks like a calculated display of self-confidence. OpenAI wants customers, employees and partners across the tech industry to know that it is still leading the charge to superintelligence. That is particularly important at a time when it is involved in a messy overhaul of its corporate structure, and as the once clear technology lead it had in large language models erodes.