Sam Altman has said that OpenAI will use ‘well over 1m GPUs’ by the end of 2025.
OpenAI has tapped chipmaker Broadcom to mass manufacture its own artificial intelligence chips set for shipping in 2026, the Financial Times has reported.
In July, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed that his company “will cross well over 1m GPUs brought online by the end of this year”. To compare, Nvidia, last year, said that Elon Musk’s xAI is en route to doubling the number of Nvidia Hopper GPUs it uses to 200,000.
OpenAI was one of the earliest customers for Nvidia’s AI chips. Since, it has been a strong consumer of its hardware. This partnership would then reduce the ChatGPT maker’s reliance on Nvidia as it tries to feed its growing chip needs on its own.
At yesterday’s (4 September) quarterly earnings announcement, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said that the company has secured a $10bn order for custom AI chips, although he didn’t disclose who the client was.
“One of these prospects released production orders to Broadcom, and we have accordingly characterised them as a qualified customer for XPUs,” Tan said.
Later, sources told the Financial Times that the new order was from OpenAI. Both the companies are yet to confirm the news.
The publication also reports that OpenAI is planning to use the chips for internal purposes, rather than making them available for external customers.
This is great news for Broadcom, which forecasts increased AI revenue next year as a result of this large order. “We will ship pretty strongly beginning 2026,” Tan said.
The company reported strong Q3 earnings with AI revenue jumping 63pc during the period of $5.2bn. Tan said that he expects AI revenue to grow by 1bn this coming quarter. The company’s chip sales also rose 57pc to more than $9.1bn in Q3.
The company’s stock price went up by nearly 5pc to more than $320 per share following the earnings call.
Google has previously partnered up with Broadcom for its Tensor Processing Unit AI chips. While the company also helps design Meta’s AI chips.
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