An official at ChatGPT maker OpenAI said in court testimony Tuesday that the AI model developer plans to spend $50 billion on computing power before the end of the year.
Co-founder and chairman Greg Brockman revealed the figure, which was previously reported by Bloomberg, during OpenAI’s closely watched legal battle with hype demon Elon Musk.
If it wasn’t obvious, that would be $50 billion of someone else’s money. Nearly four years after ChatGPT kicked off the AI boom, OpenAI executives have yet to figure out how to turn a profit. Hell, the company can’t even hit its own revenue targets, if recent reports are to be believed.
That hasn’t stopped CEO Sam Altman from convincing Microsoft, Amazon, SoftBank, Nvidia and others to issue press releases affirming their intention to invest tens of billions of dollars in his quest for AGI. (Or was it AI superintelligence? The goals weren’t exactly set in stone.)
We are not sure that the term “investment” adequately captures the backdoor financial engineering that was used in these high-profile transactions. Much depends on OpenAI using some of the pledged money to lease huge amounts of compute, either directly from its backers or from their partners.
Last February, Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank announced a $110 billion investment in the AI startup, at least $80 billion of which came with strings attached.
For example, OpenAI would have to lease two gigawatts of Trainium AI accelerators from Amazon and deploy its best GPT models in AWS to claim $35 billion of the $50 billion promised by the cloud titan.
Similarly, Nvidia’s $30 billion investment was tied to deploying five gigawatts of training and inference compute capacity at an estimated cost of $300 billion.
In other words, these companies’ investments in OpenAI are actually more of a discount or rebate. This begs the question: Can OpenAI actually spend $50 billion in 2026, or is it just throwing around bigger numbers in hopes of maintaining unassailable momentum? Place your bets – ideally by burning as many heavily subsidized tokens as possible now, before prices inevitably rise.
We have contacted OpenAI for comment; we’ll let you know if we have any news. ®