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Singapore’s Temasek Holdings is holding talks about investing in OpenAI, a deal that would mark the first time a state-backed group has funded the ChatGPT maker.
Senior executives at Temasek, one of the world’s biggest and most active investors, have met OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman multiple times over recent months, according to two people with knowledge of the talks.
Another person familiar with the discussions said the Singaporean group had initially been interested in investing in Altman’s venture capital fund Hydrazine Capital, but more recent talks had included OpenAI itself.
This person added that the talks were preliminary but ongoing, with no agreement on the size of any investment.
OpenAI and Temasek declined to comment on the discussions.
The negotiations come as Altman seeks to fund ambitious plans to launch a semiconductor business that would allow OpenAI to reduce its dependence on cutting-edge chips made by Nvidia.
Altman posted on X last month: “Building massive-scale ai infrastructure, and a resilient supply chain, is crucial to economic competitiveness. OpenAI will try to help.”
Despite huge revenue growth since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, Altman has said OpenAI remains lossmaking because of the vast costs of building and training its models.
Estimates of the cost of building out AI infrastructure from Altman and others have varied from the hundreds of billions of dollars to as high as $7tn over coming years — figures that price out traditional tech venture capitalists.
Altman has also discussed fundraising with deep-pocketed investors in the Middle East and Asia, including Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, one of Abu Dhabi’s wealthiest and most influential figures, and SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, according to people familiar with the talks.
Temasek’s $287bn portfolio includes some of the world’s top tech start-ups including payments group Stripe.
AI is a key focus for investment, according to the fund’s management. Among its existing investments in the space are UK legal technology company Robin AI, South Korean fabless AI chip start-up Rebellions and Silicon Valley-based generative AI chip designer d-Matrix.
OpenAI is backed by $13bn from Microsoft, its biggest investor, as well as several venture capital groups including Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global Management and Andreessen Horowitz.
In December, OpenAI’s revenues surpassed $2bn on an annualised basis, making it one of the fastest-growing technology companies in history. Only a handful of Silicon Valley companies, including Google and Meta, have posted revenues of $1bn within a decade of being founded.
In recent months, employees at the ChatGPT maker participated in a stock sale that gave OpenAI a valuation of $86bn, roughly three times what it was worth last April.
In November last year, Altman was ousted by the OpenAI board over allegations that he had not been “consistently candid” in his dealings with them; he was reinstated days later.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission issued subpoenas to OpenAI executives in November as part of an investigation into whether Altman had misled its investors, according to people familiar with the move.
The controversy, however, has not soured the appetite of institutional investors such as Temasek, which has continued its discussions with Altman in the aftermath.
Temasek’s interest in OpenAI reflects its increasingly global footprint over the past decade. Before 2014, the investment company had no offices in developed countries but now its presence outside of Asia stretches from Paris and London to San Francisco and New York.
Additional reporting by George Hammond