When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took the stage at BlackRock’s U.S. Infrastructure Summit earlier this month, he acknowledged his company is facing a harsh reality: data centers are hard.
“Anything at this scale, it’s just like so much stuff goes wrong,” Altman said, in a fireside chat at the conference in Washington, D.C.
Altman gave an example of a severe weather event at a data center campus in Abilene, Texas, that temporarily “brought things down.” The facility serves as the flagship site of OpenAI, Oracle
and SoftBank’s $500 billion Stargate project. Altman said his company has also been navigating supply chain challenges and pressure to meet tight deadlines.
The stakes for Altman are growing as he aims to turn OpenAI, which was valued at $730 billion in a record fundraising round last month, from a private market darling into an investable asset for a more discerning class of public market fund managers. That’s meant retreating from some hefty spending plans, shelving certain ambitious projects and accepting OpenAI’s role as a purchaser of massive amounts of cloud capacity rather than as a builder of mammoth data centers.
