OpenAI Committed to Buying $51 Million of AI Chips From a Startup Backed by CEO Sam Altman

Sam Altman was reinstated soon after being fired as OpenAI CEO last month, but still stood to gain had the company continued to develop ChatGPT without him. During Altman's tenure as CEO, OpenAI signed a letter of intent to spend $51 million on AI chips from a startup called Rain AI into which he has also invested personally. Rain is based less than a mile from OpenAI's headquarters in San Francisco and is working on a chip it calls a neuromorphic processing unit, or NPU, designed to replicate features of the human brain. OpenAI in 2019 signed a nonbinding agreement to spend $51 million on the chips when they became available, according to a copy of the deal and Rain disclosures to investors this year seen by WIRED. Rain told investors Altman had personally invested more than $1 million into the company.