Sam Altman's $7 trillion chip dreams are way off the mark, says Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

• Nvidia's CEO questioned Sam Altman's reported attempts to raise up to $7 trillion to boost GPU-chip supply.
• Jensen Huang told the World Governments Summit in Dubai that the cost would be far lower.

Jensen Huang took an indirect jab at Sam Altman when he said $7 trillion could buy “apparently all the GPUs.”

The Nvidia CEO made the quip Monday at the World Governments Summit in Dubai when asked how many GPU chips that much money could buy. Altman, OpenAI's chief, is trying to raise trillions to boost supplies of the chips needed for artificial-intelligence processing, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Huang told the United Arab Emirates’ AI minister, Omar Al Olama, that developing AI wouldn’t cost as much as the amount Altman was seeking to raise.

The Nvidia CEO said AI-infrastructure costs would be considerably less than the $5 trillion to $7 trillion Altman was reportedly trying to raise because of expected advances in computing.

"You can't assume just that you will buy more computers," Huang said. "You have to also assume that the computers are going to become faster, and therefore the total amount that you need is not as much."

He also suggested that the cost of building AI data centers globally would amount to $2 trillion by 2029. Huang said: “There’s about a trillion dollars’ worth of installed base of data centers. Over the course of the next four or five years, we’ll have $2 trillion worth of data centers that will be powering software around the world.”

Huang’s comments came after The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Altman was seeking to raise as much as $7 trillion to significantly increase the world's supply of semiconductor chips and help address the global chip shortage.

The OpenAI chief has been talking to prospective investors, including the UAE government, about his initiative, the outlet reported.

Nvidia has held talks with companies including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Meta to develop custom chips for data centers, unnamed sources told Reuters.

It already has a dominant position in the AI-chip market and is worth almost $1.8 trillion, putting it just behind Amazon at Monday's closing bell.

Nvidia is now planning to create a division to design the data-center chips and AI processors for cloud-computing firms, Reuters reported.

Nvidia and OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.