OpenAI x Broadcom — The OpenAI Podcast Ep. 8

Hello, I'm Andrew Mayne, and welcome to the OpenAI Podcast. Today, we're excited to be breaking some news involving Broadcom and OpenAI. Joining me from OpenAI is Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, and from Broadcom, Hock Tan and Charlie Kawwas.

[upbeat music] A lot of ways that you would look at the AI infrastructure build-out right now, you would say it's the biggest joint industrial project in human history.

We're defining civilization's next generation operating system.

Like, that is a drop in the bucket compared to where we need to go. That's a big drop, but [laughing] ...

So what are we talking about today? What brought you all together?

So today we're announcing a partnership between Broadcom and OpenAI. We've been working together for about the last eighteen months, designing a new custom chip. Uh, more recently, we've also started working on a whole custom system. These things have gotten so complex, you need the whole thing. And we will be starting in late next year, deploying ten gigawatts of these racks, of these systems, and our chip, which is a gigantic amount of computing infrastructure, to serve the needs of the world to use advanced intelligence.

So this is going to entail both compute and chip design and scaling out?

This is, uh, this is a full system. So we worked-- we closely collaborated for a while on designing a chip that is specific for our workloads. When it became clear to us just how much capacity, inference capacity the world was going to need, we began to think about: Could we do a chip that was meant, uh, just for that kind of a, a very specific workload? Broadcom is the best partner in the world for that, obviously. And then, to our great surprise, this was not the way we started, um, but as we realized that we were going to really need the whole system together to support this as these- as it's gotten more and more complex, it turns out Broadcom is also incredible at helping design systems. Um, so we are working together on that entire package, and this will be, uh-- this will help us even further incre- uh, increase the amount of capacity we can offer for our, our services.

So, Hock, how did this come about? You know, when did this start? When did you guys first talk about working together on this?

Well, other than the fact that Sam and Greg are great people to work with, it's a natural fit because OpenAI has been doing, continues to do the most advanced models, frontier models in generative AI out there. And but as part of it, you need, you need- you continue to need compute capacity, the best, latest compute capacity as you progress in a roadmap towards a better and better frontier model and towards super intelligence. And compute is key part, and that comes with on semiconductors, and as Sam indicated, more than semiconductors. And we are, even though I say it myself, probably the best semiconductor company out there. And more than that is AI is a very, very exciting opportunity for us in terms of we, we are-- my engineers are pushing the innovation envelope and newer and newer generations of tech- of, uh, semiconductor technology. So for us, com, uh, com- collaborating with the best generative AI company out there is a natural fit.