OpenAI’s historic week has redefined the AI arms race for investors: ‘I don’t see this as crazy’
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman listens to questions at a Q&A following a tour of the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.
Shelby Tauber | Reuters
This week, OpenAI redefined what momentum — and risk — look like in the artificial intelligence arms race.
Now comes the hard part: Executing on CEO Sam Altman‘s multitrillion-dollar vision.
In a rapid-fire series of announcements, the company unveiled partnerships involving mind-bending sums of money and cemented its place at the center of the next wave of machine learning infrastructure.
It began Monday with news that Nvidia plans to invest up to $100 billion to help OpenAI build data center capacity with millions of graphics processing units (GPUs). A day later, OpenAI revealed an expanded deal with Oracle and SoftBank, scaling its “Stargate” project to a $400 billion commitment across multiple phases and sites. Then on Thursday, OpenAI deepened its enterprise reach with a formal integration into Databricks — signaling a new phase in its push for commercial adoption.
“In all, this is the biggest tale yet of Silicon Valley’s signature fake it ’til you make it, and so far it seems to be working,” said Gil Luria, managing director at D.A. Davidson.
The startup, known mostly for its ChatGPT chatbot and GPT family of large language models, is trying to become something much bigger: the next hyperscaler. Never mind that it’s burning billions of dollars in cash and is fully reliant on outside capital to grow, nor that its buildout plans require the amount of energy that would be needed to power more than 13 million U.S. homes.
Altman has long said that delivering the next era of AI will require exponentially more infrastructure.
“You should expect OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars on data center construction in the not very distant future,” he told CNBC and a small group of reporters over dinner in San Francisco last month. “And you should expect a bunch of economists wringing their hands, saying, ‘This is so crazy, it’s so reckless,’ and we’ll just be like, ‘You know what? Let us do our thing.'”
The story OpenAI is selling is that it’s responding to market demand, which shows no signs of stopping. And eventually, the thinking goes, this will all be profitable.
Current financial projections show OpenAI is on track to generate $125 billion in revenue by 2029, according to a source familiar with the company’s internal forecasts.
It’s a bold bet – and one full of execution risk.
Building out 17 gigawatts of capacity would require the equivalent of about 17 nuclear power plants, each of which takes at least a decade to build. The OpenAI team says talks are underway with hundreds of infrastructure providers across North America, but there are no firm answers yet.
The U.S. grid is already strained, gas turbines are sold out through 2028, nuclear is slow to deploy and renewables are tied up in political roadblocks.
“I am extremely bullish about nuclear, advanced fission, fusion,” Altman said. “We should build more … a lot more of the current generation of fission plants, given the needs for dense, dense energy.”
What did crystallize this week, however, was the scale of Altman’s ambition as the OpenAI CEO began to put hard numbers behind his vision – some of them staggering.
“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,” Altman said Tuesday at OpenAI’s first Stargate site in Abilene, Texas.
That mentality – blunt, ambitious, and dismissive of convention – has defined Altman’s leadership in this new phase.
Deedy Das, partner at Menlo Ventures, said the scale of OpenAI’s infrastructure partnerships with Oracle may seem extreme to some, but he views it differently.
“I don’t see this as crazy. I see it as existential for the race to superintelligence,” he said.
Das argued that data and compute are the two biggest levers for scaling AI, and praised Altman for recognizing early on just how steep the ramp in infrastructure would need to be.
“One of his gifts is reading the exponential and planning for it,” he added.
History shows that breakthroughs in AI aren’t driven by smarter algorithms, he added, but by access to massive computing power. That’s why companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are all chasing scale.
Alibaba, OpenAI, and Anthropic have all pointed to insatiable demand for their models from consumers and businesses alike. As these companies push to embed AI into everyday workflows, the infrastructure stakes keep rising.
Ubiquitous, always-on intelligence requires more than just code — it takes power, land, chips, and years of planning.
“I think people who use ChatGPT every day have no idea that this is what it takes,” Altman said, gesturing to the site in Abilene. “This is 10% of what the site is going to be. We’re doing ten of these.”
He added, “This requires such an insane amount of physical infrastructure to deliver.”
The cost of staying ahead
Though the buildout is flashy, the funding behind it remains hazy.
Nvidia’s $100 billion investment will arrive in $10 billion tranches over the next several years. OpenAI’s buildout commitment with Oracle and SoftBank could eventually reach $400 billion.
Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest partner and shareholder that holds a right of first refusal for cloud deals, “is not willing to write them an unlimited check for compute,” Luria said. “So they’ve turned to Oracle with a commitment considerably bigger than they can live up to.”
As a non-investment-grade startup without positive cash flow, OpenAI still faces a major financing challenge.
Executives have called equity “the most expensive” way to fund infrastructure, and the company is preparing to take on debt to cover the rest of its buildout. Nvidia’s long-term lease structure could help OpenAI secure better terms from banks, but it still needs to raise multiples of that capital in the private markets.
OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said the company plans to build some of its own first-party infrastructure — not to replace partners like Oracle, but to become a savvier operator. Doing some of the work internally, she said, makes OpenAI “a better partner” by allowing it to challenge vendor assumptions and gain a clearer view into actual costs versus padded estimates.
That, in turn, strengthens its position in rate negotiations.
“The other tool at their disposal to reduce burn rate is to start selling ads within ChatGPT, which may also help with the fundraising,” Luria suggested as a way to ease its burn rate.
Altman said earlier this year in an interview with Ben Thompson’s Stratechery that he’d rather test affiliate-style fees than traditional ads, floating a 2% cut when users buy something they discovered through the tool. He stressed rankings wouldn’t be for sale, and while ads aren’t ruled out, other monetization models come first.
That question of how to monetize becomes even more urgent amid OpenAI’s breakneck growth.
“We are growing faster than any business I’ve ever heard of before,” Altman said, adding that demand is accelerating so quickly that even this buildout pace will “look slow” in hindsight. Usage of ChatGPT, he noted, has surged roughly tenfold over the past 18 months, particularly on the enterprise side.
And that demand isn’t slowing.
Accenture CEO Julie Sweet told CNBC’s Sara Eisen on “Money Movers” Thursday that she’s seeing an inflection point in enterprise adoption.
“Every CEO board in the C-suite recognizes that advanced AI is critical to the future,” she said. “The challenge right now they’re facing is that they’re really excited about the technology, and they’re not yet AI-ready — for most companies.”
Her firm signed 37 clients this quarter with bookings over $100 million.
“We’re still in the thick of it,” she added. “There’s a ton of work to do.”
Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, said Thursday that concerns about overbuilding miss the bigger picture.
“There’s going to be much more AI usage in the future than we have today. There’s no doubt about that,” he said. “Not every person on the planet is using at the fullest capacity these AI models. So more capacity will be needed.”
That optimism is one reason Ghodsi struck a formal integration deal with OpenAI this week — a partnership that brings GPT-5 directly into Databricks’ data tooling and reflects growing enterprise demand for OpenAI’s models inside business software.
Still, Ghodsi said it’s important to maintain flexibility.
Databricks now hosts all three major foundation models — OpenAI, Anthropic, and Alphabet’s Gemini — so customers aren’t locked into a single provider.
But even as infrastructure ramps up, the scale and speed of OpenAI’s spending spree have raised questions about execution.
Nvidia is supplying capital and chips. Oracle is building the sites. OpenAI is anchoring the demand. It’s a circular economy that could come under pressure if any one player falters.
And while the headlines came fast this week, the physical buildout will take years to deliver — with much of it dependent on energy and grid upgrades that remain uncertain.
Friar acknowledged that challenge.
“There’s not enough compute to do all the things that AI can do, and so we need to get it started,” she said. “And we need to do it as a full ecosystem.”
WATCH: Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank unveil $400 billion Stargate data center
In a record-setting deal worth billions, Chinese heavy equipment manufacturer XCMG has agreed to deliver more than 200 of its 240-tonne electric haul trucks to Australian mining giants Fortescue in one of the biggest moves yet to decarbonize mining.
From pioneering its “world’s first” best-practice model for smart mining at China Huaneng’s Yimin Mine and winning the 2025 Decarbonizing Mining Award to ranking among the world’s top four open-pit heavy equipment makers, XCMG is rapidly building a reputation for building high-quality electric equipment options that can do all the work without any of the emissions.
Earlier this week, XCMG joined Fortescue, one of the world’s largest iron ore producers, at a grand signing ceremony in Beijing for a strategic cooperation agreement on green mining equipment solutions. Under the terms of the new deal, XCMG will deliver up to 200 of its massive, 240T battery-electric haul trucks to Fortescue, beating a similar deal posted last year and marking China’s largest-ever export order for green mining machinery.
It’s also one of the largest-ever EV sales, period.
Big deal
Fortescue believes the deal isn’t just significant for its size and scope, but for building new global bridges in the quest for full decarbonization.
“The world once benefited from open trade and cooperation – now it is divided,” explains Fortescue Executive Chairman and Founder, Dr. Andrew Forrest. “Fortescue is showing that industry can help glue back that multilateral spirit. Not through rhetoric, but through practical alliances that prove heavy industry can follow a new path – one where profits rise as emissions fall.”
“China is scaling and manufacturing green technologies at unprecedented speed,” adds Forrest. “and “Our partnerships give Fortescue access to that capability.”
As for the trucks themselves, the new XCMG 240T electric haul trucks are absolute giants, built to handle payloads over 500,000 lbs., with a gross vehicle weight rating somewhat north of 380 (!) tonnes (that’s almost 420 Imperial tons, to you and me).
There’s enough power on tap from the big haul trucks’ 1,900 kW (2,550 hp) electric drive system to climb 17% grades and hit speeds up to 56 km/h (35 mph). That’s enough to make XCMG’s 240T one of the most powerful and capable EVs on the planet, slashing emissions without sacrificing hauling performance.
With Fortescue already saving hundreds of millions in fuel costs, this deal – big as it – is going to put an absolutely massive dent in global diesel demand.
SOURCES: Fortescue, Yahoo! Finance.
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![The Puckipuppy Labrador Pro is a full-suspension E-bike for everyone [Video]](https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2025/09/puckipuppy-header.jpg?resize=1200,628&quality=82&strip=all&ssl=1)
There are plenty of electric fat tire bikes on the market these days, but few feel as purpose-built and refined as the Puckipuppy Labrador Pro. While the name might sound like a friendly pooch, don’t let it fool you… this is a serious all-terrain machine with enough power to rip through sand, snow, or steep trails. Plus, if it can do all that, it can surely handle your commute, too!
Built for the wild (and the wild commute)
Right out of the gate, the Puckipuppy Labrador Pro feels like it’s aimed at a very specific type of rider – someone who wants the capability of an electric mountain bike, the stability of a fat tire cruiser, and the commuting chops of a Class 3 bike built for the streets.
That hybrid identity is reflected in the bike’s rugged 6061 aluminum frame, which includes internal cable routing for a clean look and a removable 48V 20Ah lithium-ion battery nestled into the downtube. The battery is locking and removable, offering a massive 960Wh of capacity. It claims up to 80 miles of range per charge under optimal conditions.
That’s quite respectable for a nearly 1 kWh battery powering a peak 1,350W hub motor!
Custom-motor muscle with real torque
Puckipuppy’s Labrador Pro isn’t running just any hub motor. This one’s a custom PUCKIPUPPY-branded unit, and it cranks out a claimed 1,350W of peak power. In addition to an extra helping of wattage, this thing delivers serious torque, and it delivers it instantly.
Thanks to the smart torque sensor, the motor responds immediately to how hard you’re pedaling. You don’t get that jarring “kick” from cadence-sensor bikes. Instead, the assist feels intuitive and fluid, even when climbing steep dirt paths or rolling over beach dunes.
It’s the kind of responsive pedaling experience that makes you forget you’re even riding an electric bike, at least until you realize you’re doing a solid 25 mph while barely breaking a sweat.
Suspension and traction dialed in
One of the standout features of the Labrador Pro is its full-suspension setup, which instantly sets it apart from most fat tire e-bikes in this price range. Up front, you’ve got a sturdy hydraulic suspension fork with 130mm of travel, while the rear features its own shock that smooths out bumps, roots, and rough terrain. Whether rolling over rocky trails or dropping curbs in the city, the dual suspension keeps the ride comfortable and under control.
That plush suspension pairs perfectly with the bike’s 26” x 4” all-terrain fat tires, which offer a massive contact patch and plenty of cushion. The bike can float over sand, gravel, and even loose pine-needle trails with zero drama. These tires aren’t limited to only off-road performance either. On pavement, they give the Labrador Pro a smooth, stable feel, especially when aired up to road pressure.
And when it comes time to slow things down, the 180mm hydraulic disc brakes give you reliable, confidence-inspiring stopping power, even on fast descents or in wet conditions.
Drivetrain and speed
Backing up the torque-heavy motor is a Shimano 8-speed drivetrain, which shifts smoothly and gives you enough range to ride comfortably even without assist. That’s especially nice when your battery gets low, or when you want to dial down the motor to extend your range on a long ride.
The Labrador Pro is also a Class 3 e-bike, meaning it provides pedal assist up to 28 mph. There’s also a left-side thumb throttle that can get you moving without pedaling at all, and it’s zippy – topping out around 20 mph on throttle alone. Combined, these modes make the Labrador Pro equally useful as a car-replacing commuter or a weekend trail shredder.
Looks and utility of the Puckipuppy Labrador Pro
The Puckipuppy Labrador Pro comes in four different colors, though the orange option here is definitely the brightest and the most fun, at least in our opinion. No matter your color, the integrated headlight and rear brake light are a nice touch for safety to help you be seen, especially for early morning or dusk rides.
It also includes front and rear fenders, which help when you’re splashing through mud or wet pavement, and a heavy-duty rear cargo rack. Plus, the bike supports up to 400 lb of payload. That makes this bike more than just a toy – it’s also a workhorse capable of hauling groceries, gear, or just about anything you can throw at it.
The full-color LCD display mounted on the handlebars gives you real-time readouts of speed, battery level, distance, and assist level. The control pad on the left is intuitive, and gives you all the info you need at a glance.
Final thoughts on the Puckipuppy Labrador Pro
The Puckipuppy Labrador Pro is a seriously capable all-terrain e-bike with great specs at a competitive price of just $1,599. For riders who want a go-anywhere, do-anything machine with torque-sensing pedal assist, fat tires, and real power under the hood, this is a compelling option.
It’s not the cheapest fat tire e-bike out there, but you don’t want the cheapest bike when you’re barrelling down a rocky trail. And when you consider the powerful motor, torque sensor, 960Wh battery, hydraulic brakes, and full commuter-ready features like fenders and a rack, it starts to look like a solid value.
Whether you’re carving through mountain trails, powering across sandy beaches, or just blasting past traffic on your way to work, the Labrador Pro brings its A game every time.
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Super73, the lifestyle e-bike brand known for its moto-inspired designs, just dropped a teaser that has fans buzzing… and scratching their heads. In a cryptic Instagram post, the company shared a silhouetted image of a new two-wheeled electric vehicle alongside the promise of unveiling “an entirely new generation of electric mobility” next month.
The official debut is set for October 11th at the Moto Beach Classic, and while details are scarce, the image and language give us a few key clues.
First, there are the visuals. The teaser image shows a chunky, fat-tire two-wheeler that looks like a departure from Super73’s current lineup. The frame appears heavily stylized with what may be body panels that cover part of the traditional bike silhouette in the rear, or perhaps just extra gussets on the frame. There’s no visible suspension, neither in the fork nor the rear triangle (in fact, there’s no rear triangle at all, opting for a classic mini-bike styled frame instead), suggesting this could be a rigid ride. That could point to a lightweight design or a retro mini-bike platform that ditches extra components in favor of simplicity and affordability.
Pedals are still visible, keeping this squarely in e-bike territory (at least legally), but everything else about the bike leans much more toward electric moto than bicycle. With large off-road tires, a long flat seat, and a minimalist-looking cockpit, it gives off stripped-down dirt bike or electric pit bike vibes.
There’s also a fairly large battery slung under the top tube. If the bike rides on 20″ tires like the rest of Super73’s lineup, then that could be a much bigger battery than we’re used to seeing. I overlaid a Super73-Z Miami on the image below, and you can see that the mystery bike’s battery dwarfs the one on the red Super73-Z. But those could also be smaller-diameter tires, meaning the battery may be a standard Super73 pack.
Then there’s the caption. Super73 says they’re unveiling the “next big thing (figuratively speaking),” which might lend credence to the theory that this will actually be smaller than their usual offerings. Could it be a compact adventure mini-bike? A budget-friendly urban ripper? A youth-focused model? We’ve seen the brand expand into kids’ bikes before, so it wouldn’t be a shocker.
The real wildcard is how much power this thing will pack. Super73 has always leaned into the blurred line between e-bike and moped, and if this new model keeps pedals just for show while cranking serious wattage under the hood, we might be looking at something more akin to a Sur Ron competitor.
With recent shakeups in Super73’s leadership team and the seemingly frozen state of the long-awaited Super73’s C1X electric motorcycle, which only made it partway through development, perhaps this could be the new model replacing the company’s former motorcycle aspirations.
Whatever it is, it’s not just another iteration of the RX. This looks like a whole new category, possibly even a new platform for the brand. And in an industry where yearly innovation often just means a new paint job, it’s refreshing to see a company hint at something different.
Stay tuned – we’ll be watching closely when the curtain lifts next month.
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