Sam Altman’s Energy ‘New Deal’ Is Good for AI. What About Americans?
OpenAI’s founder is asking Washington to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on new power plants. Society needs to see the benefit, too.
Sam Altman is hungry for power. Fresh off wrapping up a $6.6 billion funding round and consolidating his grip on OpenAI’s leadership as other co-founders depart, the chief executive officer has hit on a strategy to cement his company’s leadership over what he calls the most important technology the world has ever seen.
At a White House meeting in September, Altman and other representatives from the biggest names in artificial intelligence were assembled around the table to make their plea: We need more energy—fast. After the meeting, he followed up with a 15-page proposal containing more information on what specifically he thought the government should do. It called for construction of several 5 gigawatt power plants in various states across the US, each at a cost of around $100 billion, to be used by his own startup and other companies at the forefront of AI. The document was titled “Infrastructure Is Destiny.”