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OpenAI announces new Guaranteed Capacity offering for customers to secure compute

OpenAI announces new Guaranteed Capacity offering for customers to secure compute

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OpenAI launched "Guaranteed Capacity," allowing customers to secure long-term compute access for one to three years with discounts, addressing anticipated AI compute scarcity.
What: OpenAI introduced a new "Guaranteed Capacity" offering where customers can commit to one, two, or three-year agreements for dedicated compute resources, receiving discounts based on commitment length. CEO Sam Altman said this helps OpenAI plan ahead amidst expected long-term compute scarcity in the AI industry.
Why it matters: This move indicates OpenAI's strategy to stabilize its revenue and fund its massive compute infrastructure buildout by securing upfront, long-term commitments from enterprise customers, crucial as it targets an IPO.
Takeaway: If your organization relies heavily on OpenAI models and needs predictable performance, consider evaluating their Guaranteed Capacity offering before the current allocation sells out.
Deep dive
  • OpenAI's new Guaranteed Capacity offering allows customers to secure long-term access to computational power for their AI products.
  • Customers can choose commitments of one, two, or three years, with discounts increasing with the length of the commitment.
  • OpenAI CEO Sam Altman noted that the offering helps the company with planning and anticipates that the world will be capacity-constrained for AI compute for some time.
  • The company is targeting approximately $600 billion in total compute spend by 2030 and is valued over $850 billion by private investors.
  • This initiative is expected to help OpenAI generate more revenue as it prepares for a potential IPO as early as this year.
  • OpenAI will offer this until the current allocation is sold out, with plans to reintroduce it in the future.
Decoder
  • Compute: In the AI industry, refers to the computational power and resources (like GPUs, TPUs, servers) required to train and run large AI models.
Original article
  • OpenAI announced Guaranteed Capacity, which allows customers to secure long-term access to compute.
  • The company said customers can choose between one, two and three-year-long commitments and their corresponding discounts.
  • OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the new offering will help the company plan ahead, which he hopes will be a "big win-win."

OpenAI on Tuesday announced a new offering called Guaranteed Capacity, which allows customers to secure long-term access to compute to power their artificial intelligence products, agents and workflows.

The company said customers can choose between one, two and three-year-long commitments, and it's offering discounts that increase based on those annual commitments, according to its website.

"Customers are increasingly asking us for certainty on capacity. As models get better, we expect that the world will be capacity-constrained for some time," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a post on X.

Altman said the new offering will help OpenAI plan ahead, which he hopes will be a "big win-win." He added that OpenAI will offer Guaranteed Capacity until it sells out of its current allocation, but that the company plans to offer it again in the future.

In the AI industry, compute refers to the computational power and resources required to train and run large AI models. It's extremely expensive and difficult to build on a large scale. OpenAI has told investors that it is targeting roughly $600 billion in total compute spend by 2030, as CNBC previously reported.

OpenAI, which is is valued at more than $850 billion by private investors, is looking to bring in more revenue as it gears up for a potentially massive IPO as soon as this year. The company unnerved Wall Street by inking a flurry of multi-billion-dollar compute deals late last year, sparking debates about how OpenAI would be able pay for such a large infrastructure buildout.

Altman repeatedly brushed off concerns, writing in a post on X in November that OpenAI expects to grow to hundreds of billions in sales by 2030. The company's new Guaranteed Capacity program could help lay the foundation for what its compute business model will eventually look like.

In his post on Tuesday, Altman said OpenAI will make sure it leaves enough capacity available for its products like ChatGPT and its coding assistant Codex.

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