When the day before it was discussed about OpenAI’s intentions to attract additional capital for its development, in addition to the venture fund Thrive Capital, only Microsoft Corporation was mentioned as potential investors, but now The Wall Street Journal claims that Apple and Nvidia may join them. The amount of investment can be measured in several billion US dollars.
Image source: NVIDIA
As noted, Microsoft has invested approximately $13 billion in OpenAI since 2019, which gives it the right to receive 49% of the startup’s profits. Both Nvidia and Apple are OpenAI partners, as the former provides the startup with the computational accelerators necessary to run its large language models, and the latter is interested in developing artificial intelligence systems within its own Apple Intelligence ecosystem. It will rely on ChatGPT initially, but will later develop its own capabilities in this area.
If Apple decides to invest in OpenAI, it would be an unusual move for it, as it doesn’t typically invest in startups. But in 2017, Apple invested $1 billion in the Japanese Vision Fund of SoftBank, since this fund was engaged in venture investments, but it did not directly participate in such activities. In 2016, Apple invested $1 billion in the Chinese startup Didi, which is essentially an aggregator of taxi services. It was then assumed that such an investment would help Apple bring closer the creation of its own automatic taxi, but this year the project was buried.
As Bloomberg notes, this Wednesday OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar notified company employees in a mailing about the search for new sources of capital. Similar attempts, according to the source, have been made since last December. OpenAI intends to use the proceeds to increase computing power and cover other operating expenses, as noted by the CFO.