The Chip Insider®– Sam Altman’s $7T play to save the semiconductor industry

Summary:

Sam Altman’s $7T play to save the semiconductor industry: I’m sure you’ve heard of his efforts … to “reshape the global semiconductor industry” …. I don’t need to tell you the trillion-dollar scale of this plan is unprecedented. But let’s go through some comps to put it in perspective. Altman’s semiconductor restructuring fund is around two-to-three times the size of the electronics industry. It is around ten times the size of the semiconductor industry, around 50 times the size of the semiconductor equipment industry, and around 300 times the amount needed to build a single gigafab and … to complement it. No wonder it has faced outsized criticism from industry experts who see it as a silicon newbie’s fantasy…

It is said his fund-raising efforts have included … I have to ask, what is it with Sam Altman that people are tracking him like he’s Taylor Swift? Instead of Swifties, maybe we should call Altman’s fan base ‘Sammies.’ That doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Consider that last year’s center of attention was Jensen Huang, making him the opening act for Sam Altman this year…

Seriously, there is some sanity in the fund’s sizing at 10X the semiconductor industry’s size, as ... To give Sam credit for … Reverse engineering Altman’s tactical approach into his strategy… the funding scale difference reveals that the strategy is more likely to buy the companies he needs, rather than build his own… Altman really wants to accelerate the semiconductor industry’s 30-year shift away from …

What about the demand side? Altman’s $5-7T play implies a demand for semiconductors that would be around a third of the global economy by … when … year they … account for just 0.33% of World GDP in PPP (Purchasing Power Parity). So this is far more than a … industry restructuring… Altman’s $5-7T play implies a global restructuring of the world’s economy that hasn’t been seen since China embraced a market-based economy with Deng Xiaoping’s black-cat/white-cat strategy (It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice. But in this case… My suspicion is the biggest barriers …

“I never met a purchase order I didn’t like” – Jerry Sanders

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