Altman clarifies OpenAI’s stand on the government’s AI support
Amid criticism of OpenAI’s comments on government support, CEO Sam Altman posted on X to clarify misunderstandings.
Altman emphasized that the company has discussed potential U.S. federal loan guarantees to support the construction of semiconductor plants in the United States. The talks did not involve guarantees for data centers, and no application has been submitted.
His comments followed remarks from OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar at WSJ’s Tech Live event that drew criticism. In essence, Friar said OpenAI would support a federal backstop to make it easier to finance sizable investments in AI chips.
As GNcrypto wrote previously, Friar later clarified that her “backstop” remark referred to the AI industry broadly, not to OpenAI, and noted the company is not seeking a government backstop for its infrastructure. In his post, Altman restated this point, saying that OpenAI doesn't have, nor does it want, government guarantees for its data centers. According to Altman, governments may benefit from building their own infrastructure through a strategic national reserve of computing power. “But this should be for the government’s benefit, not the benefit of private companies,” he stressed.
Altman argued that taxpayers should not backstop private data center projects or rescue firms for poor decisions. Speaking of OpenAI’s goals, he outlined the company’s plans to spend about $1.4 trillion over the next eight years to expand computing capacity, including new data centers and increased chip output. Without a large advertising or cloud business, OpenAI has signed infrastructure agreements with chipmakers such as Nvidia and AMD totaling roughly $1 trillion. How the unprofitable firm will pay for the build remains unresolved. Analysts reviewing a Microsoft filing estimate OpenAI lost more than $12 billion in the third quarter. Altman projects an annualized revenue run rate above $20 billion by year-end and targets hundreds of billions by 2030. The company was last valued at $500 billion.
“Is OpenAI trying to become too big to fail, and should the government pick winners and losers? Our answer on this is an unequivocal no,” Altman wrote on X. “If we screw up and can’t fix it, we should fail, and other companies will continue doing good work and servicing customers.”
OpenAI is also assessing direct sales of computing capacity to businesses and individuals - an “AI cloud,” as Altman described - which could require new equity or debt financing. Such an offering would place OpenAI closer to major cloud providers, including Microsoft and Google, and to “neocloud” vendors like CoreWeave that supply its GPU infrastructure.
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