OpenAI Wants To Get To $1 Trillion a Year in Infrastructure Spend, Sam Altman Says (axios.com)
- Reference: 0179897884
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/10/28/1848223/openai-wants-to-get-to-1-trillion-a-year-in-infrastructure-spend-sam-altman-says
- Source link: https://www.axios.com/2025/10/28/openai-1-trillion-altman
> The statement helps clarify the many announcements the company has made with its chip, data center and financing partners. That total includes the already announced deals with AMD, Broadcom, Nvidia, Oracle and other partners. That's just the starting point, Altman said. Over time, the company would like to have in place a technical and financial apparatus that would allow it to build a gigawatt of new capacity per week at a cost of around $20 billion per gigawatt.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2025/10/28/openai-1-trillion-altman
what is infrastructure spend (Score:4, Interesting)
Is it a noun? A verb?
Re:what is infrastructure spend (Score:5, Insightful)
Idiot CEO bullshit speak.
Re: (Score:2)
PhbGPT
Re:what is infrastructure spend (Score:5, Informative)
You're not supposed to understand the buzzwords, just give me money!
Re: (Score:3)
It's a big ask.
Re: (Score:1)
And since when is a gigawatt a measure of data center capacity?
But hey, it's only $20 BILLION a week in spending, just $4 BILLION a day. Nice to be a non-profit.
Re: what is infrastructure spend (Score:2)
What the hell is a Jiggawatt?!
They finna'to (Score:3)
Just let them get their money right and they'll be back. Can you hold on to it for two weeks?
It's gonna be funny (Score:3)
When someone figures out how to run all of this AI junk on two Z-80 processors.
Re: (Score:2)
Hell, I had Eliza running on just one Z-80 processor and it was still better than this hallucinating crap incorrectly called "AI".
Re: (Score:2)
Yup! Me too.
New Business Rules (Score:2)
Your work as a CEO will be judged not by how much profit you make, but by how much you spend. Before inevitably going bust.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, to be fair, all these AI companies are currently running on the old adage 'we lose money on every sale, but make it up in volume'.
It doesn't matter how much he spends on infrastructure, at some point he has to charge people more or cut his costs to run these models.
Re: (Score:1)
Yep:
https://wlockett.medium.com/you-have-no-idea-how-screwed-openai-actually-is-8358dccfca1c
Re: (Score:3)
> It doesn't matter how much he spends on infrastructure, at some point he has to charge people more or cut his costs to run these models.
At a trillion dollars a year they'd need to increase the cost by a factor of more than 4 and increase the paid user count to 1/8th of the entire planetary population just to cover capital spending. If you charged corporate America $30k a year for each employee made redundant by AI you would need to replace ~20% of the entire productive US workforce to cover just those costs.
Re: New Business Rules (Score:2)
It's pretty simple: if open AI can spend trillions, it probably has quadrillion. People seems to buying it....
Re: (Score:2)
Which is cuter, your contempt for environmentalism or your blind faith that Sam Altman gives a shit? Keep praying, I'm sure you'll be relieved of the malcontents.
pricey service (Score:2)
That would be 1.4M users worth $1000 each in a timeframe short enough to make a profit and not find a better investment. They must be counting on that 1.4M users being worth $10000 each or more on a longer time frame. Good luck. You can only sell so many hallucinations.
Re: (Score:3)
> That would be 1.4M users worth $1000 each in a timeframe short enough to make a profit and not find a better investment. They must be counting on that 1.4M users being worth $10000 each or more on a longer time frame. Good luck. You can only sell so many hallucinations.
It's actually worse than that... your calculation is off by three orders of magnitude. 1.4 B users, not 1.4M.
Re: (Score:2)
Right! Exactly!
This is stupidity (Score:2)
Somebody somewhere is going to reduce energy costs with architecture, reduce power on the hardware end. Software is already so wasteful when it comes to energy and not a lot of optimization because it's hard
Well then, Sam ... (Score:2)
... just get out your checkbook.
nice spend... how pay? (Score:2)
OpenAI is on track to generate $13B in revenue in 2025 with a 16% increase over 2024. Good luck spending 10x revenue.
Re: (Score:2)
that's revenue... what is the profits?
what percentage of profits or expected profits for ROI.
Re: (Score:2)
Profits? Very funny!
Their expenses are much larger than revenue. They're nowhere close to producing a profit. And since they're now committed to spending $1.4 trillion over the next ten years, they need to get to $140 million per year revenue (and do it really fast) just to break even. Increasing their current revenue by 10x wouldn't be enough to do it.
Can you imagine how much better your life would be (Score:3)
If you could get your government to spend 1 trillion on infrastructure spending?
How much better your roads and water in schools and hell we would could build entire new cities and solve the housing crisis.
Remember it doesn't matter how much your house is worth if you can't sell it and buy a cheaper one. And trust me you do not want to fuck around with home equity loans that's a good way to lose your house and find out what the housing market is currently like.
But instead we are going to spend a trillion dollars automating customer service jobs so billionaires don't have to pay them.
What a fucking hell of a world we've created.
It's okay though because I'm sure after we automate tens of millions of jobs that will suddenly be all these new jobs that I keep hearing about in vague terms. We can go do whatever the buggy whip guys did after they lost their jobs right? We certainly haven't been doing factory automation for 50 years and they're certainly hasn't been any improvements in factory automation. Or maybe it's biotech now? Or learn to code?
I'm sure the jobs will materialize. I mean it's not as if we've got something crazy like the history of two industrial revolutions creating massive technological unemployment leading up to two world wars right?
On what? (Score:1)
The Weighted Random Word Generating Bullshit machine? Who the fuck is paying for these subscriptions? There is no possible way they're anywhere near that level of revenue!
This is getting out of control. (Score:2)
$1.4T, really ? This is getting out of control! I'd rather see those funds go to Thorium Molten Salt reactor research. AI is just going to make humanity stupid and dependent on it. It's time to write a WORM to take out AI. Also building a high output EMP won't hurt either. All the power that AI consumes.. the energy is better off going to residential use. You don't want AI, trust me.
Android please (Score:1)
God i wish i could swap gemini for chatgpt on my pixel When will you make an android distro sam? Heck you could even farm out some gpu cycles from me to shave 0.5c off your infrastructure costs
In other news (Score:5, Insightful)
A million little girls want a pony.
Re: (Score:3)
He's out here legit saying he wants his company to be 3% of the US economy.
This is crazy.
Re: (Score:2)
He wants it to be 100%. There's a job for that AI capacity to do, it's to destroy everything else.
Re: (Score:2)
> A million little girls want a pony.
A pony isn't good enough for Altman - he wants a unicorn that farts rainbows, shits chocolate, and pisses lemonade.
Re: (Score:2)
I wanna pony also, don't stereotype!
Re: (Score:2)
> A million little girls want a pony.
Oddly enough, buying ponies for those million little girls would cost less around 1% of the proposed annual spend here. You could also buy a backhoe for a million little boys for another couple of percent or so.
Pony? You misspelled Rust. (Score:1)
Maybe you meant pony rust.