Is Sam Altman Gambling With the U.S. Economy?

Sam Altman is going all in. In an interview following Monday’s deal with AMD—which brought OpenAI's total deals this year to a value of roughly $1 trillion—Altman said that OpenAI was making a "company-scale bet" that it is now the right time to "spend a lot on infrastructure."

He's hoping that the more chips the company throws at training AI models, the more useful they'll become—and the more people will be prepared to pay for them. The deals give OpenAI chips through chipmakers AMD and Nvidia, and data centers through cloud-computing provider Oracle. This will run an eye-popping 20 gigawatts’ worth of computing power, which will be used to train and deploy OpenAI's models. The first portions of this are due to come online in 2026.