OpenAI now plans to spend roughly $750B on cloud computing through 2030, up from the $600B projection it floated earlier this year. That’s a 25% increase in projected spend in a matter of months, which tells you everything about how fast the AI infrastructure race is accelerating.
The revised figure, reported by the Wall Street Journal, reflects a wave of new capacity agreements as the company scrambles to lock up the computing power needed to train and run its next generation of AI models. For context, $750B is more than the current market capitalization of most publicly traded companies on Earth.
Project Camellia and the push to own infrastructure
The most interesting part of the spending increase isn’t about renting more cloud capacity. It’s about OpenAI deciding to build its own.
Project Camellia is a $20B data center campus in Effingham County, Georgia. It represents a strategic pivot: OpenAI’s first site where the company serves as lead designer and developer, rather than leasing space from an existing cloud provider.
