Image by DALL-E 3 for VentureBeat

Sure, the Super Bowl was exciting — Kansas City, Travis Kelce, Taylor Swift, yada yada yada. But not even the hometown challengers, the San Francisco 49ers, could keep Silicon Valley as engrossed as the news about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his quest for up to $7 trillion in AI chip funding, which the Wall Street Journal reported last Thursday.

That’s because Altman kept his X posts coming, one after the other, all weekend long — from short, cryptic bites like “chaotic good” and “also roon is my alt” to slightly longer missives insisting that he doesn’t “really know that much about this rumored compute thing” and pushing back on haters with “you can grind to help secure our collective future or you can write substacks about why we are going fail.”

But to me, Altman’s post-dump is far less interesting than the complex geopolitics of AI chips, which ground the funding reports in real news that we all should pay attention to. A quick online search on the issue, in fact, will take you on a fascinating trip around the globe.

Around the world in AI chip geopolitics

You can start your geopolitical AI chip tour in Taiwan — where TMSC manufacturers most of today’s chips suitable for AI workloads, including those designed by Nvidia, based in Santa Clara, California, which enjoys