> doesn't mean they would turn down a company like OpenAI paying them $$$ for just the packaged chips and the technical documentation to build their own PCBs

FWIW, this was the standard state of affairs of the GPU market for a long while. nVidia and AMD sold the chips they paid someone to produce to integrators like EVGA, PNY, MSI, ZOTAC, GIGABYTE, etc. Cards sold under the AMD or nVidia name directly were usually partnered with one of these companies to actually build the board, place the RAM, design the cooling, etc. From a big picture perspective, it's a pretty recent thing for nVidia to only really deliver finished boards.

On top of this, OpenAI/Sam Altman have been pretty open about making their own AI chips and what not. This might point to them getting closer to actually delivering on that (pure speculation) and wanting to ensure they have other needed supplies like RAM.