Formula 1: The GOAT

”Can I have five billion dollars?” Fatih asked with a smile on his face, as if he were asking for five dollars.

”You are not trying to buy an F1 team, are you?” Rümeysa asked, her heart skipping a beat as she wondered if now that he had the money, he was going to dive headfirst into it without considering the factors.

”Not yet,” he said as a matter of fact, before adding, ”I want to invest a billion dollars in Helios for them to accelerate their expansion and have a usable product ready for deployment by the end of the year. Three billion for another new company, MOO.”

”A cow company?” Rümeysa interrupted when she heard Fatih talking about spending 3 billion on a company called MOO, which caught Fatih by surprise before he started laughing when he realized what she meant.

After half a minute of laughing, he finally collected himself to explain, ”MOO is an abbreviation of Master of One. This company will be a fabless chip company that will focus on creating inference chips for AI,” he said, still breathing heavily.

”What is inference?”

”Current and future GPUs are designed to do many things; the same GPU is used for gaming, AI training, rendering, and many other things, so it results in a jumbled mess of compromises. GPUs built for training AI are very bad at running an already trained one and use more power while being inefficient. So, this company will design a single-purpose GPU, going all-in on inference computing and removing everything that isn’t needed.

This should allow for better performance since the same size die used on a competitive GPU will now be fully utilized for a single task, reducing power consumption while improving performance,” Fatih explained his idea. He had been thinking about how much more to prepare to fully exploit and benefit from the upcoming AI boom.

While Helios was going to make him a software powerhouse (much like Microsoft did) that would allow companies to use any GPU they had on hand to train their AIs without worrying about cross-compatibility, the GPU company would be selling something not available on the market, but forever needed in the AI market: inference GPUs.

This meant that if he could make it a reality, he would be selling both the digital and physical shovels for the upcoming gold rush. Now seemed to be the perfect time, since companies were trimming themselves in preparation for the expected economic downturn due to the pandemic.

”I will have them look into it,” she said, finally understanding what he was trying to do, despite not knowing if the AI market was going to be as big as he was imagining for them to spend a total of four billion dollars on just those two companies.

”What about the last billion?”

”Prometheus Research Center. I need to give them a bonus, but also increase their research funding and tools to get better results for things I’m curious about,” he said with a smile, making it clear this was the most interesting part of his request, even more so than the other two.

She wanted to ask him what he was even doing with the research center he had founded all the way back in 2018, but she decided not to pry too much since the money they were spending on it was very modest. Now that he wanted to plunge a billion dollars into it, she couldn’t help but be curious. ”What are they even doing there?”

”They are doing research on...” he said, trying to explain what they were doing, as he had been reading the reports every time a new discovery or improvement was made, and increasing the things they needed to do research on whenever he had an idea and wanted to know if it was feasible.

”So, all for F1 applications?”

”Some might start as that, but I’m sure the improvements from it will be useful in wider areas,” he said, not giving a definitive answer since some of the research was still in its early stages or had yet to show improvements.

”The full amount is too much, but I will have a meeting with them and come up with a good amount to invest,” she said, not fully killing the idea but not confirming an entire billion-dollar investment.

”That is good enough,” he said, pausing for a moment before he added, as he remembered something he had previously been dragging his feet on asking his mother about, ”and can Helios invest about forty million dollars in something?”

”Where?” Rümeysa asked. Having experienced some bizarre or weird requests from her son that most of the time required money, only for most of them to be proven as very good ideas that provided large returns, she had become someone who was always ready to hear her son fully break down what he had on his mind before making a decision, instead of cutting him off midway just because it sounded absurd.

”I want Helios to sponsor AlphaTauri as a title sponsor for the 2021 season, with the sponsorship money being given to them this year. It would be ring-fenced to be used only for the development of the 2021 car and a few additional things that we will include during the negotiations.

This is the perfect moment. Since the F1 season has been suspended, they are currently discussing ways to reduce costs to keep the teams from going bankrupt, making them very desperate and giving us some leverage. And if we use it well, the car can improve. By the time I get in, it can be a very competitive car that will allow for the promotion conditions to be met.

If I manage to win even a single race, then this is going to be a very good promotion for Helios, since the logo and name are going to be everywhere,” he said, finally revealing the real reason: promotion to the Red Bull car as fast as possible.

’They are going to pay me back through win bonuses anyway,’ he thought, knowing that if he could be promoted, the amount of money he could extort from Red Bull through the agreed-upon bonus would be more than half the amount they would be spending to get in as a title sponsor.

Having used his previous F1 knowledge as an obsessed fan to make seed money, he was now finally using some of that money and knowledge to actively change things to fit his situation better. At the moment, that meant improving AlphaTauri by helping them avoid the mistakes they had made in his previous life.