Ziff Davis CEO Questions OpenAI: If You Can Invest $750 Billion in Data Centers, Why Can't You Pay Publishers?

BlockBeats news, September 14: Vivek Shah, CEO of digital media and internet company Ziff Davis, stated that if OpenAI can invest $750 billion in computing power by 2030, it will have the ability to pay news publishers for content licensing fees.

Shah recently commented on the U.S. Department of Justice's position in a copyright lawsuit in the Southern District of New York, saying that the government believes licensing agreements between AI companies and publishers could increase industry burdens and limit AI development, but in fact, a large number of publishers have already reached licensing partnerships with frontier AI companies such as OpenAI, and platforms like Cloudflare and Tollbit are also reducing the operational costs of licensing and royalty payments.

He pointed out that OpenAI previously disclosed to investors that it expects to invest approximately $750 billion in computing power by 2030, and content licensing fees are merely a "small amount" in comparison. Taking the U.S. music industry as an example, its annual royalties and licensing payments are less than $20 billion; if the news publishing industry received fees of a similar scale, the impact on the overall spending of LLM companies would be limited, yet it could bring important income to various content creators.

Shah also warned that without a reasonable licensing mechanism, publishers may block AI from scraping content through paywalls and technical restrictions, ultimately leading to higher costs for consumers to obtain free information and squeezing creators' income channels.