Sam Altman plans to spend trillions of dollars on OpenAI’s data center buildout

OpenAI chief executive officer Sam Altman has indicated spending trillions of dollars on data center build outs in the “not very distant future” using possibly innovative financing instruments that Open AI is currently working on to fund it.

“You should expect OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars” on data centre construction in the “not very distant future”, Altman said.

According to reports that quoted the CEO in a rare and wide-ranging interview with journalists last week, Altman claimed that the company is working on designing “a new kind of financial instrument for finance and compute that the world has not yet figured out” to bankroll the jaw-dropping amount.

Alman believed that eventually OpenAI would see “huge profits” and hence, it’s “very rational” for them to continue investing in AI.

Another more conventional way of funding the venture is going public, Altman reckoned. He added that OpenAI is currently still working to complete a complex corporate restructuring effort that has been ongoing for months.

The CEO declined however to give a specific timeline.

While admitting that there is currently an AI bubble, Altman believed that the technology will have a lasting impact, just like the internet, and that society as a whole would unlikely regret the massive spending on AI.

At the same time, he believed some current start-up valuations are “insane” and some would get “burnt”.