OK, fair enough, but what are OpenAI doing buying production capacity rather than, say, paying NVIDIA to do it? OpenAI aren’t the ones making the hardware?

> OpenAI aren’t the ones making the hardware?

how surprised would you be if they announced that they are?

Just because Nvidia happily sells people discrete GPU's, DGX systems, etc., doesn't mean they would turn down a company like OpenAI paying them $$$ for just the packaged chips and the technical documentation to build their own PCBs; or, let OpenAI provide their own DRAM supply for production on an existing line.

If you have a potentially multi-billion dollar contract, most businesses will do things outside of their standard product offerings to take in that revenue.

Because they can provide the materials to NVIDIA for production and prevent Google, Anthropic, etc from having them.