Sam Altman says OpenAI wants to build a Gigawatt AI infrastructure factory

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has outlined an ambitious plan to create a “gigawatt factory” that would produce vast amounts of AI infrastructure every week. Writing in a blog post titled Abundance Intelligence, Altman argued that the scale of AI infrastructure currently available is only scratching the surface of what will be required in the near future.

Altman described compute capacity as the new oil of the global economy, claiming that access to powerful AI systems may eventually become as important as access to electricity or clean water. He suggested that AI could be considered a fundamental human right in the future, given its potential to provide education, healthcare, and scientific breakthroughs to billions of people.

According to him, OpenAI’s vision requires building out both inference and training compute at a massive scale. He emphasised that the world cannot afford to choose between deploying AI to cure cancer, provide personalised education for every child, or tackle climate change — humanity needs all of it, which requires orders of magnitude more computing capacity.

Altman provided an example of how 10 gigawatts of compute power could allow AI to make critical progress in areas like drug discovery or educational personalisation. He warned that failing to expand infrastructure quickly enough would limit the benefits of AI and slow down progress on some of the most important challenges of our time.