New Delhi: The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, announced that it reaches an annualised revenue run rate of more than 20 billion and is investing a lot in international data infrastructure. Altman posted details on X, saying that by 2030, OpenAI forecasts the ability to make hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue and has already secured about $1.4 trillion of data centre commitments through the next eight years. The news comes after months of speculation and numerous billion-dollar partner acquisitions in the form of cloud providers and governments around the world.
The post by Altman followed the controversy on comments made by the CFO of OpenAI about the possibility of government loans. In explaining those remarks, Altman also set the company larger business goals, such as going into enterprise AI, consumer hardware, robotics, scientific research, and potentially cloud computing.
Expanding into enterprise and consumer AI
Altman affirmed that OpenAI business is expanding at a rapid rate, with a count of customers in the enterprise business using its tools reaching more than a million. On the one hand, the company will launch a full-fledged enterprise offering in the next couple of months, competing more closely with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud AI suites.
He also hinted at new products that deal directly with consumers, citing the purchase of the design company of Jony Ive by the OpenAI company, LoveFrom Io, at the beginning of this year. The partnership is reportedly directed towards creating a small AI machine that is the size of a palm and will make conversational AI a more everyday occurrence.
New frontiers: Science, robotics and AI cloud
The scientific discovery industry is also in the sight of OpenAI. Little information is available, but Altman claimed that the company has an OpenAI for Science project, headed by the company VP Kevin Weil, to make breakthroughs in fields such as medicine, energy, and materials faster.
Altman also made a twist to this matter when he stated that compute capacity would be sold by OpenAI soon – it would become an AI cloud provider of the future. He was quite certain that the world will require a lot of AI clouds. The shift would place OpenAI in the same line of business as larger cloud providers, which would be a significant step towards infrastructure self-sufficiency.
Funding the AI ambition
In a move to launch its enormous data and compute visions, Altman admitted that OpenAI could use conventional funding sources such as equity sales and loans. Although the company does not have its own data centre network yet, the aggressive scaling approach that it is pursuing speaks of its desire to have dominance at all levels of the AI stack, including models, hardware, and infrastructure.