OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says his company is 'out of GPUs' to which I reply 'welcome to the party, pal'

Images of Nvidia's Blackwell GPU from GTC. — (Image credit: Nvidia)

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has taken to X to voice a common complaint in TYOL 2025: His company is "out of GPUs." As someone who regularly trawls the listings looking for the best graphics card deals, I sympathise. They're goshdarn hard to get hold of these days, aren't they?

Of course, Altman is referring to chonky enterprise-grade GPUs like those used in the Nvidia DGX B200 and DGX H200 AI platforms—the latter of which OpenAI was the first to take delivery of last year. In fact, it was hand delivered by Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, so getting hold of more of them seems like it may be a mere phone call away.

GPT-4.5 is ready!good news: it is the first model that feels like talking to a thoughtful person to me. i have had several moments where i've sat back in my chair and been astonished at getting actually good advice from an AI.bad news: it is a giant, expensive model. we…February 27, 2025

As Altman explains, his company will add "tens of thousands" of GPUs next week to its portfolio in order to roll out its new model, GPT-4.5, to its Plus tier service (via TechCrunch). In the meantime, however, a shortage of GPUs has meant that it hasn't happened at quite the speed OpenAI had hoped.

"It is a giant, expensive model. We really wanted to launch it to plus and pro at the same time, but we've been growing a lot and are out of GPUs" says Altman.

"We will add tens of thousands of GPUs next week and roll it out to the plus tier then... this isn't how we want to operate, but it's hard to perfectly predict growth surges that lead to GPU shortages."

I bet. In fact, a difficulty in anticipating demand seems to be something OpenAI and Nvidia might share, as it's very difficult to get hold of GPUs in general right now thanks to supply shortages, a shut down of production of older cards, and high demand.

Having hardware of its own on tap seems to be in OpenAI's future, as the company is reportedly planning to build its own AI chips, likely to break its reliance on high-level silicon from Nvidia.

Still, the good news for those of you waiting to try out GPT-4.5 is that Altman seems immensely proud of it:

"It is the first model that feels like talking to a thoughtful person to me. I have had several moments where I've sat back in my chair and been astonished at getting actually good advice from an AI."

No-one would be more astonished than me to receive good advice from an AI. Anyway, while Altman says that GPT-4.5 wont be crushing any benchmarks, it's ready to go and he's very excited for people to try it. On the off chance that Nvidia misreads the message and sends a batch of RTX 5070 Ti GPUs by mistake, any chance you could chuck a few this way, Sam?

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Andy built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 12, when IDE cables were a thing and high resolution wasn't—and he hasn't stopped since. Now working as a hardware writer for PC Gamer, Andy spends his time jumping around the world attending product launches and trade shows, all the while reviewing every bit of PC gaming hardware he can get his hands on. You name it, if it's interesting hardware he'll write words about it, with opinions and everything.

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