OpenAI发布首款自研AI芯片，与博通合作

Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. >> [music] >> Bloomberg Tech is live from the heart of Silicon Valley [music] with Ed Ludlow in San Francisco. >> This is Bloomberg Tech coming up. Open AI unveils its first custom AI chip called jalapeno developed in partnership with Broadcom. Plus SK Hynix is planning to raise $29 billion in a landmark US listing racing to increase capacity to meet memory chip demand. And Cerebrus reports quarterly earnings for the first time since going public. CEO Andrew Feldman joins [music] us later this hour. Let's get to our top story, custom silicon. Open AI is tackling one of AI's biggest challenges, the supply and cost of computing. The company unveiled jalapeno intelligence processor. That's the wafer, a custom AI chip developed with Broadcom, >> [music] >> which the company say carries a 50% lower cost versus a typical AI GPU. The focus, faster, [music] cheaper AI inference. Shares of Broadcom open pretty higher, around 2%. We're off session highs but still up a percentage point or so in a market where tech at the index level kind of flat. This is out performance. Bloomberg Tech editor Seth Feigerman is here with the details. This is the big picture, right?

Open AI is compute constrained, heavily reliant on Nvidia. They want to diversify. What do we need to know? >> Yeah, that's right. I think, you know, Open AI wants to own more of the infrastructure stack, have more flexibility here. And then I think importantly use the expertise that it's developed into what makes AI models run better and more efficiently and apply that to the hardware in the same way that I think we're seeing Google do with its TPUs. And the hope would be that over time they can build a chip that's is cost-efficient and also better performing and eventually cuts down its own costs. >> Um Bloomberg News spoke to both Hock Tan, the CEO of Broadcom, um and OpenAI's hardware chief. I guess, you know, from Broadcom's perspective, there was quite a lot of fighting talk, right?

They see a lot of demand for ASICs or custom silicon. But what was interesting to me is Hock Tan saying to us they see a world where every frontier lab goes to have a custom chip. Why?

>> Yeah, I mean I I I I get back to what we said about OpenAI a minute ago. I think giving them the versatility to kind of control their infrastructure stack and build custom hardware that meets their needs. Now, I think in Hock Tan's comment, he's saying there's not that many of these frontier model developers. So, I think if you read between the lines, what we're kind of talking about is Anthropic going to move in this direction. And that's certainly a possibility. And to your other point, I think Hock Tan sounds quite bullish generally on the prospects for this chip and chips like it going forward. He sees no limit to the demand for this kind of infrastructure. And he's predicting that the demand uh and roll out for this chip next year will exceed his prior estimates for 1.3 gigawatts of supply. >> On the OpenAI side, it's the latest example of them being prepared to spend. Did we get any sense from our conversation with the company about how this custom chip will rank in their overall plan for compute, whether it's leasing data center, buying Nvidia chips, etc.?

>> Yeah, you know, they remain pretty tight-lipped on what the financing for this will look like. We have previously reported that OpenAI plans to spend tens of billions of dollars on these chips with Broadcom part of its hundreds of billions of dollars in in infrastructure commitment. You know, Broadcom has previously said that they're standing up a chip financing vehicle that could help OpenAI's efforts. But it's unclear if that's the primary financing mechanism for what OpenAI will do here. >> Bloomberg's AI editor, Seth Fiegerman, thank you very much indeed. SK Hynix plans to raise $29.4 billion dollars in its US market debut, a deal large enough to rank among the top five share sales of all time. The listing comes at a time when markets are hungry for memory chips and semiconductor companies are rushing for capital to expand capacity, meet that demand. With us Peter Elstrom, who leads our coverage of Asia tech, joins us. That's part of it, right?

Expand memory fab capacity, raise a lot of money. There's also this idea of like valuation and prestige of an ADR situation where you get exposure to American investors. >> Yeah, that's right. SK Hynix is a company we don't talk about that often on the show. Obviously a leading memory chip company, but they often play second fiddle to Samsung even in South Korea. But what we've seen from them over the past 3 years is really they've come from quite far behind to essentially the same market cap size as Samsung at this point. And that's largely because they've been so successful in these memory chips for AI applications, the HBM chips that we've talked about before. They essentially HBM chips are are are DRAM chips stacked on top of each other and their technology for doing that stacking has been very good. They got Nvidia's blessing. They've been able to jump ahead of Samsung in that market quite effectively. Samsung has struggled a little bit. So now what we're seeing with this 29 billion dollar fundraising is really them announcing to the US, hey, that they're they're ready to raise this kind of capital. They want more exposure in the US. And yeah, they'd like more of that PE multiple that you see with the US tech companies, too. They've traded at a discount to that. If they get some of that ADR exposure, that may give them a little more opportunity to increase that valuation. >> And just on the mechanics, Peter, so it will be ADRs, I I believe, on the Nasdaq. Do we have a timeline for this?

And and how much of a surprise was it that SK plowed ahead with this? >> Well, it's certainly they've talked about wanting to raise money in the US for a while, so I think in in in terms of direction uh this has been expected. I think in terms of magnitude it's a bit of a surprise though. It's a lot of money as you mentioned it could be one of the top five uh offerings of its kind uh uh ever. Um they plan to start trading these ADRs on July 10th. They've talked about that. They still have a couple of steps to go before they formally do that, but that's the plan at this point. They'd be able to raise that money and then as you say they really want to spend this money on trying to solve this uh choke point that they've had in the AI industry where memory chips are in short supply, prices have been soaring, which is driving profits for a bunch of companies including Micron as we'll see after the bell today, but they want to be able to build additional capacity in South Korea. They're also expanding in the United States where they have some facilities too. >> Bloomberg Tech Executive Editor Peter Telsey, thank you very much. The AI hardware story and memory in particular are set to dominate market conversations today. We've got the perfect person to speak about it. Celine Wu is a portfolio manager on Third Asset Management's Global Robotics and Automation team. She manages the firm's Tech and AI focused ETF called Techy or TEKY, an actively managed ETF where SK Hynix and its Korean shares are the top holding. Welcome to the program. >> Thanks for having me. >> The the the situation with the memory makers is fascinating. Um demand is exceeding supply. Historically that's an enviable position to be in and the shares of those companies probably reflect that. How do you see investor appetite to to be exposed to the memory trade?

>> Yeah, I mean the shares have been fantastic, but even after that I think memory stocks still offer a very compelling investment case. And here's why. I don't think it's necessarily just driven by temporary supply bottlenecks. Instead, I think there's something structural going on in the cycle. For example, memory's strategic value is rising and to a primary driver for pe