TMTPOST -- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman refuted Tesla Inc. and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s doubts on an artificial intelligence (AI) venture with massive committed capital.
Credit：OpenAI
“They don’t actually have the money,” Musk said in response to an OpenAI statement introducing the AI venture Stargate posted on his social media platform X, referring to OpenAI and other backers of Stargate which pledged a total of $500 billion.
“SoftBank has well under $10 billion secured. I have that on good authority,” Musk said in a subsequent post, claiming another Stargate initiator has much less firepower to finance the venture than it promised.
Responding to Musk’s abovementioned post, Altman directly denied Musk’s claim about SoftBank’s liquidity. “Wrong, as you surely know,” Altman said in his post Wednesday.
The OpenAI leader called on Musk to visit the first site of Stargate AI projects, and suggested Musk’s bashing on Stargate was due to the venture’s competition with his own AI projects.
Musk’s post about Softbank was “far off base,” CNBC cited an anonymous source familiar with the project. “There’s no doubt” that Musk’s testy relationship with Altman was the catalyst for his posts about Stargate, according to the person.
Musk’s assertion is not true, CNN learned from a source, who pointed out SoftBank has $24.3 billion of cash on its balance sheet per its latest earnings and it is comfortable taking on more debt to help fund the project, the wherewithal to access more capital.
U.S. President Donald Trump announced late Tuesday Stargate, co-founded by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle, plans to input a total of up to $500 million with initial investment of $100 billion in AI projects, and is expected to create “over 100,000 American jobs almost immediately.”
“We’re starting off with tremendous investment coming into our country at levels that nobody’s really ever seen before,” Trump said in in a White House briefing. He added Stargate will build “the physical and virtual infrastructure to power the next generation of AI,” including data centers.
Stargate intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States, backed by SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and Abu Dhabi-based tech investment firm MGX as initial equity funders, OpenAI said in a statement.
“This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world,” the ChatGPT-developer said.”This project will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.”
SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with the former having financial responsibility and the later having operational responsibility, and Son will be the venture’s chairman, according to the statement. It said Arm Holdings Plc., Microsoft Coporation, Nvidia Corporation, Oracle, and OpenAI are the key initial technology partners.
The buildout of Stargate is currently underway, starting in Texas, and it is evaluating potential sites across the U.S. for more campuses, OpenAI said in the statement.
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