OpenAI executives explain their view on why they’re spending hundreds of billions to build power-hungry data centers, amid tech bubble fears.
Spending hundreds of billions on AI might scream “tech bubble,” but OpenAI insists its investments are all about keeping up with the relentless demand.
“I think that we are still very much at the .01% of where we’re going,” OpenAI President Greg Brockman told journalists during a Q&A session at the DevDay conference on Monday.
The company has recently made massive deals with Nvidia, Oracle, and now AMD so it can build energy-hungry gigawatt data centers to power next-generation AI. The spending may sound over the top—especially since it’ll mean building millions of new enterprise GPUs and even new power plants—to keep such data centers running.
But in OpenAI’s view, the company is merely scratching the surface of its full potential. “The degree to which, if we had a 3x, 10x more compute, we would just build—offer so many more products, offer more services that people would love to consume more,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during the Q&A. “This can go very far.”
One of the company’s latest projects is the Sora app, an AI video generator that might one day rival TikTok.
