Sam Altman on OpenAI’s $850 billion in planned buildouts: ‘People are worried. I totally get that’
Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI Inc., during a media tour of the Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas, US, on Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2025.
Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images
ABILENE, Texas — Sam Altman stood on a patch of hot Texas dirt, the kind that turns to dust storms on dry days and mud slicks after a sudden rain. Behind him stretched the outlines of what will soon be a massive data center complex in the west-central part of the state, where heavy wind often meets extreme heat.
It was a fitting backdrop for the OpenAI CEO to unveil what he calls the largest infrastructure push of the modern internet era: a 17-gigawatt buildout in partnership with Oracle, Nvidia, and SoftBank.
In less than 48 hours, OpenAI has announced commitments equal to 17 nuclear plants or about nine Hoover Dams. The plan will require the amount of electricity needed to power more than 13 million U.S. homes.
The scale is staggering, even for a company that’s raised a record amount of private market cash and seen its valuation swell to $500 billion. At roughly $50 billion per site, OpenAI’s projects add up to about $850 billion in spending, nearly half of the $2 trillion global AI infrastructure surge HSBC now forecasts.
Altman understands the concern. But he rejects the idea that the spending spree is overkill.
“People are worried. I totally get that. I think that’s a very natural thing,” Altman told CNBC on Tuesday from the site of the first of its mega data centers in Abilene. “We are growing faster than any business I’ve ever heard of before.”
Altman insisted that the building boom is in response to soaring demand, highlighting the tenfold jump in ChatGPT usage over the past 18 months. He said a network of supercomputing facilities is what’s required to maximize the capabilities of AI.
“This is what it takes to deliver AI,” Altman said. “Unlike previous technological revolutions or previous versions of the internet, there’s so much infrastructure that’s required, and this is a small sample of it.”
The biggest bottleneck for AI isn’t money or chips — it’s electricity. Altman has put money into nuclear companies because he sees their steady, concentrated output as one of the only energy sources strong enough to meet AI’s enormous demand.
Altman led a $500 million funding round into fusion firm Helion Energy to build a demonstration reactor, and backed Oklo, a fission company he took public last year through his own SPAC.
Critics warn of a bubble, pointing to how companies like Nvidia, Oracle, Broadcom and Microsoft have each added hundreds of billions of dollars in market value on the back of tie-ups with OpenAI, which is burning cash. Nvidia and Microsoft are now worth a combined $8.1 trillion, or equal to about 13.5% of the S&P 500.
Skeptics also say the system looks like a circular financing model. OpenAI is committing hundreds of billions of dollars to projects that rely on partners like Nvidia, Oracle, and SoftBank. Those companies are simultaneously investing in the same projects and then getting paid back through chip sales and data center leases.
Friar has a different perspective, arguing that the entire ecosystem is banding together to meet a historic surge in compute needs. Big tech booms, Friar noted, have always required this kind of bold, coordinated infrastructure buildout.
Altman added that such cycles of overinvesting and underinvesting have marked every past technological revolution. Some people, he said, will surely feel the pain.
“People will get burned on overinvesting and people also get burned on underinvesting and not having enough capacity,” he said. “Smart people will get overexcited, and people will lose a lot of money. People will make a lot of money. But I am confident that long term, the value of this technology is going to be gigantic to society.”
‘More and more demand’
OpenAI’s partners are betting big on that future. Oracle is even reshaping its leadership around it. On Monday, the company promoted Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia to CEO roles, replacing Safra Catz. Magouyrk ran cloud infrastructure and Sicilia was president of Oracle Industries.
“When you think about why make a transition now, it’s really around Oracle’s being set up for success,” Magouyrk told CNBC. “I only see more and more demand from the end users … what looks like near infinite demand for technology.”
Nvidia is fronting equity alongside its chips, including the new Vera Rubin accelerators meant to power the next wave of AI workloads. The Abilene facility is being leased by Oracle.
“Folks like Oracle are putting their balance sheets to work to create these incredible data centers you see behind us,” OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said in an interview on site.
She explained that OpenAI will pay operating expenses for the data centers when they’re online, while Nvidia’s investments are getting the project up and running.
“But importantly, they will get paid for all those chips as those chips get deployed,” Friar said, referring to the arrangement with Nvidia.
Friar, who previously helped take Block public as CFO and then guided Nextdoor to the public market as CEO, pointed to the balancing act between equity, debt and operating expenses. She said that the facilities breaking ground now are aimed at bringing new capacity online next year.
“But then it’s about what gets built for 2027, 2028, and 2029,” she said. “What we see today is a massive compute crunch. There’s not enough compute to do all the things that AI can do, and so we need to get it started — and we need to do it as a full ecosystem.”
As for OpenAI’s long-term relationship with Microsoft, “They’re a major partner,” Friar said, adding that the company will continue to be a key supplier of compute capacity.
She hinted that more developments are on the way with Microsoft, and that she’s “pleased that we are where we are, but not fully ready to announce everything yet.”
In Friar’s current role, the numbers are much bigger than they ever were at the two companies she took public. Eventually OpenAI investors will expect returns on their hefty investments, but Altman said that the question of an IPO is “complicated.”
“I assume that someday we will be a public company,” he told CNBC. “I have mixed feelings about it … for now, we’re certainly able to raise a lot of capital in private markets.”
He said that being public could make long-term investments harder, given the need to meet Wall Street’s expectations on a quarterly basis. But it would open up access to a broader base of investors, he said.
“I think that the world should, if people want to, own shares in OpenAI. I think that’s awesome, and I want that to happen,” Altman said.
In the near term, the story is about many billions of dollars plowed into chips and data centers in places like Abilene, and eventually in New Mexico, Ohio and elsewhere.
But OpenAI isn’t just about infrastructure. In May, the company made the stunning announcement that it had acquired Jony Ive’s nascent devices startup for about $6.4 billion. Bringing in the designer of the iPhone and the rest of Apple’s most popular products wasn’t an accident.
While in Texas, Altman hinted at hardware that could reshape how people use computers in their everyday lives.
The OpenAI CEO said computers have never before been able to truly “understand and think,” and that breakthrough creates the chance to invent an entirely new way of using them.
He cautioned that it will take time before OpenAI has anything ready to ship. Even when it gets there, the company plans to release only a “small family of devices,” he said. But the potential, Altman said, is “something big” and worth pursuing.
WATCH: OpenAI CFO: Need partners like Oracle and Microsoft to meet demand
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Tesla will continue to extend its “one-time” FSD transfer scheme for at least another quarter, according to CEO Elon Musk at today’s Tesla shareholder meeting.
Tesla’s shareholder meeting is underway, and the big headline is that shareholders have enthusiastically voted against their own interests, diluting their own voting rights and handing more control of the company to the one person on Earth currently negatively affecting its business the most, CEO Elon Musk.
At the end of the meeting, Tesla hosted a Q&A session with shareholders in attendance, and one of them asked a question we’ve heard before: whether Tesla owners who purchased Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software, which still has not been delivered despite the first purchases happening almost a decade ago at this point, would be able to transfer the licenses to that undelivered software if they choose to buy a new Tesla vehicle.
So far, Tesla’s official policy has been that owners must purchase FSD with each new vehicle they buy, and can’t transfer the licenses between them. However, it did offer a “one-time” exception to that rule for a two month period in 2023. After that, Tesla owners would never be allowed to transfer their FSD license again.
Well, except for the next time that Tesla allowed it. Then the next time. Then Tesla saying no, it won’t come back. Then it came back.
And now, it’s still active, having started in April.
So, the question was perhaps a little out of date. The program hasn’t just been active for a single quarter this time, but for the last half-year. There is no listed end date on Tesla’s website.
Nevertheless, Musk answered the question thusly:
We have done that a few times. I guess we could extend it again. Alright, we’ll extend it for at least another quarter, and then play it by ear after that.
This in fact seems like a limitation as compared to the current status of the program, since it is active with no end date at the moment. Musk mentioning that it might only last for another quarter suggests it may end earlier than Tesla’s website language currently suggests.
However, it’s been apparent all along that this is more of a way to stoke demand, hoping to get current owners to purchase FSD on new cars, so Tesla can hold on to the up to $15,000 it charged those owners for undelivered software.
Musk has continually stated, for more than a decade, that FSD is right around the corner. Consumers were led to believe that their FSD systems would be active soon, with Musk often stating it would be released by “next year.” Musk said that owners would be able to make money by running a robotaxi service, and that their cars would be “appreciating assets” because of it – and now Tesla is making revenue like that, but you can’t.
The years have come and went, and many cars are either out of service, getting old and reaching time for replacement, or owners have been scared away by Musk’s disgusting and high-profile political actions which have included sympathizing with Nazis.
Those owners who have moved on will seemingly never get back their investment into the false promises that Musk advanced, but it only makes sense that owners who do want to retain their license and move it to a new vehicle should be able to do so. Tesla sold software, the software still isn’t working, and people should be able to enjoy that software for a reasonable amount of time if they bought it.
And yet, Tesla continues jerking its most loyal owners around, those who have held strong through the incredible brand damage Musk is doing, and suggesting that the right thing to do is only available as a limited opportunity – trying to nickel and dime the most loyal owners into buying new cars earlier than they would have planned, with the specter of having to re-purchase FSD if they didn’t do so.
That said, there are several current cases in court covering the issue of Tesla’s false advertising regarding FSD. So this issue might be solved for the company by outside forces eventually anyway. But it would have been better if Tesla just did the right thing to begin with – which it continually resists doing.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk pushed back the dates for a demo of the next-gen Tesla Roadster, which he has said will be able to “fly” and suggested that it might not even be a car at all.
Tesla has been teasing the existence of a future, high-performance sportscar model for years now. Originally it was unveiled in 2017 for a 2020 release, but has been repeatedly pushed back, with another delay today.
Just last week, Musk said that a demo was coming at the end of the year of the Roadster, and that it would be perhaps the most exciting demo of any product ever. Musk also stated that the Roadster will have more tech than all James Bond vehicles combined
Today, he was asked a question at Tesla’s shareholder meeting about the status of that project (including whether the “James Bond” tech would make it to other Teslas – to which Musk responded “um, no”). Here’s the full answer regarding the product’s unveiling:
The product unveil of the Roadster 2, which will be very different than what we’ve shown previously, that demo event will be April 1 of next year. I have some deniability because I can say I was just kidding. But we are actually tentatively aiming for April 1, for what I think will be the most exciting, whether it works or not, demo of any product. And then I guess production is probably about 12-18 months after that. I think production is about a year or so after that.
When the questioner seemed to respond with disbelief with that answer (who ever thought that this car could ever possibly be delayed?!), Musk answered:
Well, I can’t give away secrets, but you won’t be disappointed.
Musk also said, during the meeting, that owners of Founders’ Series reservations, which represent a $250,000 loan given to Tesla for the last 8 years, would all be invited to the demo.
This new timeline represents yet another delay for the oft–delayed vehicle. The most recent official announcement suggested it would go into production this year, though Musk has waffled on that.
So, this official announcement puts us back to a timeline of April 1 for the reveal, which is a delay of at least 3 months from when it was supposed to occur as of last week, and production starting (not cars hitting the road) at least in April 2027, or at late as potentially October 2027. If we take the higher end of that range, then the Roadster is likely to only be available in 2028, 11 years after its first unveiling and 8 years after original estimates.
That said, it’s not much of a surprise that the Roadster would be delayed again. Just last week, we saw a new job listing for the Roadster, looking for a “concept development” engineer. That’s a fairly early part of the production process, and even makes it seem like a 2027 release could be optimistic.
In the interim, several other high-performance electric cars have appeared to give the “hard-core smack down” to gas-powered cars that Musk promised.
We’ve seen records set by the Xiaomi SU7 Ultra, built by a smartphone company from concept to production in just a couple years. We’ve seen the Rimac Nevera R get to 186mph faster than a Bugatti Chiron Super Sport. We’ve seen the Lotus Evija X, which set the third-fastest Nurburgring lap ever, only beaten by two one-off, track-only, purpose-built racecars (one of which is a hybrid, the other is electric). And we’ve seen the BYD Yangwang U9 Xtreme become the fastest production car ever at 308(!!!) miles per hour.
These are milestones that the Roadster might have been able to take a shot at, but time has passed it by, and others have stepped in in the Roadster’s absence.
But maybe that doesn’t matter, because Musk’s comments today suggest the Roadster might not be what we expected.
All along, it has been assumed that the Roadster will be something like the original version unveiled in 2017. But today, Musk said it will be “very different than what we’ve shown previously.” We don’t know what those differences entail – whether it just means the car will have new tech, or if it will be a completely different style of car.
We can imagine that anyone who gave Tesla a $250,000 loan for ten years might be bothered by ending up with a totally different bill of goods than they put their money down for, though, so we hope the plan is to at least keep it a sportscar.
There are some questions about whether these technologies Musk has mentioned will be on the car, though, and if they will be helpful for anything other than a demo if so.
Recently, Tesla patented a “fan car” system which would enhance grip. It’s actually a pretty cool patent, with interesting improvements over previous implementations of the same idea.
But it is decidedly not a “flying car.” In fact, being able to fly would not actually help sportscar performance, and would actually hurt it. Sportscars are typically looking to maximize downforce in the most efficient manner, in order to enhance grip, but to fly, one must create “upforce,” which isn’t a term anyone uses because it creates no actual performance benefit.
So, while it is highly expected that the Roadster demo might be able to “fly,” we hope that doesn’t make it to production on a sportscar, as that’s more of a parlor trick and would take performance benefits away from where they would be more useful – like having a fan car system, or directional jets to increase lateral acceleration, rather than useless upwards acceleration.
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