OpenAI execs can't stop talking about not having enough GPUs

"OpenAI's C-suite can't stop talking about the company's insatiable demand for computing power. "Every time we get more GPUs, they immediately get used," OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil recently told XPrize founder Peter Diamandis during an interview on Diamandis' "Moonshot" podcast. Weil is just the latest OpenAI exec to sound off on the topic. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last month that the company will bring on more than 1 million GPUs by the end of the year."

""very proud of the team but now they better get to work figuring out how to 100x that lol," Altman wrote on X in July. Two days later, Musk's, Altman's former ally turned rival, said he wants xAI to have 50 million equivalents of Nvidia's H100 chip in the next five years. The @xAI goal is 50 million in units of H100 equivalent-AI compute (but much better power-efficiency) online within 5 years- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 22, 2025"

"The competition is for good reason. Jonathan Cohen, VP of Applied Research, recently said GPUs are like "currency" for AI researchers. Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg's wife and a cofounder of the couple's philanthropic organization, said the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative uses GPUs as a recruitment tool. Weil said the necessity is really quite simple: "The more GPUs we get, the more AI we'll all use." He compared how adding bandwidth made the explosion of video possible."

OpenAI and competitors are escalating GPU procurement to fuel large-scale model training and deployment. OpenAI plans to exceed one million GPUs by the end of 2025 and leadership is urging dramatically larger fleets. Elon Musk's xAI targets tens of millions of H100-equivalent units. Executives describe GPUs as a form of currency for researchers and as a recruitment and operational asset for organizations. Increasing GPU availability is presented as directly enabling greater AI usage, analogous to how increased bandwidth and lower latency enabled the explosion of video. Massive superclusters (for example, Colossus with over 200,000 GPUs) are already being used to accelerate model training.

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