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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

That's a ridiculous sum. Even if you divide it over a decade.

Global semiconductor sales are about 0.6 trillion annually. Semiconductor industry is projected to invest $0.5 trillion 2024 into chipmaking.

Gulf states are full of dumb money that can be extracted with nice Powerpoint and hype talk, but that's too much even for them.

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In talks with TSMC, Altman has said he wants to build dozens of chip-fabrication plants in the next few years, the people said. His vision would be to raise the money from Middle East investors and have TSMC build and run them. https://archive.is/tyZq2#selection-6231.180-6234.0

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The whole arab league GDP (which is whole arab countries not only golf) is about 3.5T [1] which is a little bit over half of this amount. Too much is understatement.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arab_League_countrie...

Gulf states sovereign wealth funds have about $3.7T in total assets. They would have to sell 50% of the assets to get 25% share in Sam Altman's new project.

If they tried to sell all $3.7T at once - they'd be lucky to end up with $2.5T.

Maybe they just transfer them, first trillion+ barter based fundraising round?

At some point, someone usually wants cash instead of shares in Neom (usually quickly), and you need to liquidate those shares for cash, affecting the valuation of said speculative assets.

Slightly less than related, but sovereign wealth funds can pay absolutely insane amounts of money for the talent that they want. FAANG is far from the end game for truly talented developers.

What's even better, they are not good at recognizing talent. They are incompetent.

When some has reputation of being a talent, or appears to be talented catch, they throw money and perks.

Who is "they" ? Sovereign funds or faang?

any examples?

> FAANG is far from the end game for truly talented developers.

I’ve spent the last 18 months in UAE, pretty well networked into Oxford and Cambridge university alumni networks, and never heard any suggestion of this. The team behind Falcon in AD seem to pay pretty well, but not FAANG.

Even if the gulf states had the money, they still wouldn't do it. The main thing they care about is decreasing their risk of having their assets frozen by the U.S., which is why they are happy to make money-losing investments. Whereas investing this much into a single venture would massively increase their exposure.

These people literally talk about "creating God" and "replacing humans" when they talk about this stuff.

He's probably pricing hyperinflation into the synergy NPV calculation.

But he's not asking for future dollars, he's asking for present(ish) dollars, in microeconomics terms

Come on. It is only a slightly above the combined value of Microsoft, Apple and Google. Many people has this kind of pocket change laying around /s

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