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The hardest-working people in tech right now must be the OpenAI team responsible for writing press releases. On Monday—Columbus Day or, if you prefer, Indigenous People’s Day—when much of American business and government was closed, OpenAI put out its sixth big news announcement of the past three weeks. The company unveiled another chip-supply deal, this time with Broadcom, which is working with OpenAI to develop a custom-made artificial intelligence chip for the ChatGPT creator.
For those who’ve given up counting, that makes three such chip-supply deals OpenAI has unveiled in less than a month. These three arrangements collectively aim to create a total of 26 gigawatts of chip capacity over several years (for reference, CEO Sam Altman on Monday described even a 1-gigawatt data center as a “tiny city”). Each of the semiconductor companies involved in the deals—Nvidia, AMD and now Broadcom—is due to start delivering chips to OpenAI by the second half of 2026, which is shaping up to be a monumentally important time for the AI firm. The way Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman put it in a video about the Broadcom deal released today, they need this extra capacity to meet demand for their services (and even internal demand among OpenAI staffers).
Altman and Brockman cast their mission in historic terms. The current AI infrastructure build-out is the “biggest joint industrial project in human history,” Altman said grandly on the video. “This requires a lot of companies, a lot of countries, a lot of industries to come together.” That’s for sure. Companies including Oracle, CoreWeave, AMD, Nvidia, Arm, Google Cloud and Microsoft are working to supply either chips or server capacity for OpenAI. SoftBank, which owns most of Arm, is also helping put up much of the money OpenAI needs. And of course, a bunch of other private equity firms and investors are involved one way or the other on the financing end of the industry’s broader AI buildout. Any hiccup could cause a seizure that could ripple across the financial system. (We broke the news today about Arm’s involvement.)
There are other ways of handling the demand-and-supply crunch. OpenAI could take away ChatGPT’s free tier and require everyone to pay. That would likely depress demand by causing people to think more seriously about how much they really need to ask ChatGPT to help write an email, or to use the Sora video service to generate a silly clip for TikTok. The vast majority of OpenAI’s 800 million weekly users don’t pay, which must unnecessarily inflate usage—and add to demand for computing capacity. Altman noted in the video that every “10x” improvement in OpenAI’s services is followed by a “20x” increase in demand.
Of course, OpenAI won’t do away with its free tier while rivals like Google’s Gemini still have one. Both companies are trying to get people hooked on the service so that later they can either start charging or introduce ads or other ways of making money from a big group of nonpaying users. That strategy makes sense for other tech products, but it doesn’t work so well when the entire economy is being turned upside down to ensure there is enough data center capacity to serve everyone who wants to use AI. The best way to understand the real level of demand for any product is to see what price people are willing to pay for it. That holds as true for AI as for anything else.
Apple TV Minus
Is this the start of a streaming nomenclature revolution? Apple declared on Monday that its streaming service, Apple TV+, “is now simply Apple TV, with a vibrant new identity.” Apparently the people maintaining the Apple TV website didn’t get the memo, as it was still called Apple TV+ as of Monday afternoon. But no matter—this is a big deal!
After all, a few years ago, when everyone and their dog was jumping into the streaming market, it seemed they all thought the only way to name a service was to add the plus sign to existing brand names. Apple, more than others, had a reason to do so, seeing as it has a streaming box called the Apple TV. The company now appears less concerned about the potential for confusion. Or perhaps it wants to prepare for the day Apple TV adds commercials, when it will be known as Apple TV+Ads!
In Other News
• JPMorgan Chase will invest $10 billion in mostly U.S.-based tech companies working in areas aligned with strategic government interests. The investments are part of a broader pledge by the bank to facilitate $1.5 trillion of transactions in areas including domestic manufacturing and AI.
• China’s commerce ministry said it will retaliate if President Donald Trump makes good on his threat to impose an additional 100% tariff on Chinese imports.
• Data startup Fivetran will merge with data management company Dbt Labs in an all-stock deal, the companies announced Monday, confirming an earlier report by The Information.
• More than half of Amazon Bedrock, a cloud service for building AI applications using models from Anthropic and other providers, is now running on Amazon’s custom-designed AI chips, Julia White, chief marketing officer at Amazon Web Services, said in an interview on The Information’s TITV.
Today on The Information’s TITV
Check out today's episode of TITV in which talk with Julia White, CMO of AWS, about the company‘s new suite of enterprise AI tools, and about the traction AWS’s AI chips are getting with customers.
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