OpenAI Runs Out of AI Accelerators — CEO Explains GPT-4.5 Delay

OpenAI has announced the release of its GPT-4.5 AI model, but it is only available to users of its $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro subscription. The full rollout of the new model has been delayed because “we’ve grown too big and we’ve run out of GPUs” needed to run it, CEO Sam Altman said.

Image source: nvidia.com

«Next week we will add tens of thousands of GPUs and release it on the Plus tariff,” the CEO of OpenAI promised, adding that the company will soon receive hundreds of thousands more accelerators. Due to the global shortage of computing power, the company was forced to turn to Broadcom to jointly develop its own accelerator for AI. However, this will take more than one year, and in the meantime, to meet its needs and the needs of its customers, the company has to work with equipment from Nvidia and other suppliers.

This once again highlights the advantageous position Nvidia remains in. The company recently announced that its latest-generation Blackwell accelerators are sold out through October of this year. And with the global data center industry planning large-scale expansions of existing facilities and the construction of new ones, success will continue for the green ones for several more years. OpenAI and Microsoft alone are working on a $100 billion supercomputer, and Elon Musk intends to expand his Colossus supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, to more than a million accelerators. A 3 GW facility has been approved in South Korea, and there are plans to launch a data center on the Moon.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has expressed concern that AI facilities will become overpowered, even as new models become increasingly computationally demanding. A prime example is OpenAI’s new GPT-4.5. It’s a “giant, expensive model,” as Sam Altman described it. It costs $75 for 1 million inputs and $150 for 1 million outputs — compared to $2.50 and $10 for GPT-4o. Despite the price, it’s “not a reasoning model, and [it] won’t beat the benchmark,” the OpenAI CEO admitted, but, he said, “it’s a different kind of intelligence, [it] has a magic that I haven’t felt before.”