Sam Altman Wants to Spend $5 Trillion on AI, Even Though He Hasn’t Found $500 Billion for Stargate Yet

Although OpenAI has yet to raise even $500 billion for its much-hyped Stargate project, CEO Sam Altman is already speculating on how much money he may need to spend in the future. Speaking on a podcast with The Times, Altman suggested it could be $5 trillion.

The head of OpenAI also spoke about what he intends to do in the future. In particular, he allows for the implementation of new “Stargate projects” in countries other than the US, as well as the purchase of infrastructure companies around the world.

The AI ​​mega-project Stargate was announced after the inauguration of the new US President Donald Trump. It is a joint project of OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank, as well as the Arab MGX and other companies. In the near future, it is planned to invest several tens of billions of dollars in its implementation (although Elon Musk has already expressed doubts that the money will be found for this.

The emergence of economical and efficient models from China’s DeepSeek has cast doubt on the need to build a gigantic infrastructure on the scale of Stargate, although companies like Blackstone and Brookfield still have no doubts about the need for new data centers. Altman has no doubts about the project either. According to him, spending $500 billion on Stargate today looks insanely large-scale, but in a few years, the businessman is sure, the project will no longer seem so big, and $5 trillion may turn out to be a very realistic amount.

The Stargate project is planned to be completed in four years, with the companies exploring options for building data centers in 16 states in addition to the “flagship” facility in Texas. The plan is to build 5-10 campuses, each of which will have a capacity of 1 GW or more.

Altman said he would like to bring the Stargate project to Europe and has had “promising” talks on the continent. Altman also said he has been approached by people from around the world to discuss building new Stargates.

Altman said he expressed a willingness to discuss such projects and expected his interlocutors to be willing to invest $100-800 million, but was surprised to realize that there are “some governments” willing to invest in truly significant infrastructure clusters.

Still, Altman acknowledges that “there will be ups and downs” in the data center buildout, but suggested that OpenAI could buy ready-made infrastructure “for 10 cents on the dollar” as a result. It’s unclear, though, what would happen to OpenAI itself during such a downturn—the company has yet to make a profit, and its costs have already reached astronomical levels.

In 2024, Altman expected to raise up to $7 trillion to gain control over the entire chain of AI projects, from energy infrastructure and data centers to chip development and production. For comparison, according to some sources, the United States spent $4 trillion in World War II (adjusted for inflation), NVIDIA is worth about $3.5 trillion, and TSMC is “only” worth about $871 billion.

Moreover, even under Biden, Altman promoted the idea of ​​building an entire network of 5 GW data centers for AI projects in the US government.