OpenAI Group PBC is in talks to raise at least $10 billion from Amazon.com Inc., The Information reported late Tuesday.
The retail and cloud giant is no stranger to investing in large language model startups. It’s the biggest backer of Anthropic PBC, OpenAI’s top rival. A few weeks ago, Amazon Web Services Inc. opened a $11 billion data center campus built to run Anthropic’s workloads.
The campus is expected to host more than 1 million of AWS’ custom AWS Trainium2 artificial intelligence chips by the end of the year. According to CNBC, OpenAI will also adopt the cloud provider’s processors in the event that the funding round the companies are discussing materializes. The report didn’t specify which specific chips the ChatGPT developer might use.
AWS debuted its newest custom AI chip, AWS Trainium3, earlier this month at its annual re:Invent conference. It includes eight cores made using a three-nanometer process. Each core includes 32 mebibytes of onboard SRAM memory that it uses to store AI models’ data. Keeping data close to the transistors that process it reduces the distance the information has to travel between memory and logic circuits, which speeds up calculations.
Trainium3’s eight cores each feature four different compute modules. There’s a so-called GPSIMD engine that manages the onboard SRAM memory and performs certain other tasks. Two modules are optimized to process multiple data points simultaneously, while the fourth module runs computations on one piece of data at a time.
AWS deploys Trainium3 chips in machines called Amazon EC2 Trn3 UltraServers. The chips inside each system exchange data via a custom network device, the NeuronSwitch-v1, that the cloud says provides double the bandwidth of previous-generation hardware. AWS can link together thousands of Trn3 UltraServers to create a cluster with up to 1 million Trainium3 chips.
If the funding round closes, OpenAI might adopt not only the cloud giant’s current-generation custom silicon but also future chips. When AWS debuted Trainium3 at the start of the month, it also previewed the processor’s planned successor. Trainium4 is expected to provide at least six times more performance for AI workloads that process data stored in the FP4 format.
This week’s reports didn’t specify the valuation at which Amazon might invest in OpenAI. The ChatGPT inventor received a $500 billion valuation after its most recent secondary sale. An investment from Amazon would likely increase that sum because OpenAI’s revenue has presumably grown since its secondary sale. According to CNBC, the company added 2 million paid ChatGPT users between June and August alone.
Photo: Amazon
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