In 2017, a custom Nvidia server with eight of their best GPUs cost $150,000—a price that would rise roughly with inflation to nearly $195,000 by 2023. In the coming years, OpenAI’s Law was projecting that OpenAI would need thousands, if not tens of thousands, of GPUs to train just a single model. The cost of electricity to power that training would also explode. OpenAI needed more money—not just $1 billion, but billions of dollars to sustain itself in the coming years.
