The implication here is that the primary goal is to corner the market, not to use the supply. If you aren't going to use them anyways then of course it is silly to pay for them to be finished.
Do you think that's fine, or do you think that implication is wrong and OpenAI does actually plan to deploy 40% of the world's DRAM supply?
Yes, they've made insane scaling bets before and they have paid off.
If what we've heard about no acceptable pre-training runs from them in the last two years trying to increase the memory for training by two orders of magnitude is just a rehash of what got them from gpt2 to gpt3.
> The implication here is that the primary goal is to corner the market
You have no evidence of that. Even at face value, the idea of "cornering the market" on a depreciating asset with no long-term value isn't a war strategy, it's flushing money down the toilet. Moreover, there's a credible argument OpenAI wanted to secure capacity in an essential part of their upstream supply chain to ensure stable prices for themselves. That's not "cornering the market," either, it's securing stability for their own growth.
Apple used to buy-up almost all leading-edge semiconductor process capacity from TSMC. It wasn't to resell capacity to everyone else, it was to secure capacity for themselves (particularly for new product launches). Nvidia has been doing the same since the CUDA bubble took off (they have, in effect, two entire fabs worth of leading-edge production just for their GPUs/accelerators). Have they been "cornering" the deep sub-micron foundry market?