Altman's AI power grab is tone-deaf and infeasible

SAM ALTMAN MAY be a visionary but he could use some help reading the room.

- LIAM DENNING

The OpenAI CEO has made yet more headlines for reportedly telling employees he targets 250 gigawatts of data-centre capacity by 2033. In power terms, that is like building a not-small country, equivalent to roughly one-third of peak demand on the entire US grid. This is the same US grid already morphing into a political third rail amid fast-rising bills and warnings of blackouts, with proliferating data centres linked to both. A bit more nuance and creativity, plus a dash of realism, is in order.

Building dispatchable generation—nonrenewable and, in practice, natural gas-fired plants—to power Altlandia in under a decade is infeasible. Looking back over the past 15 years, the fastest, sustained level of gas-fired deployment has been 12.5 Gw per year, according to Hugh Wynne of Sector and Sovereign Research. If we somehow achieved double that pace, immediately, it would result in only 200 Gw over eight years. Even that overstates things since turbines, unlike data centres, don’t run flat out (so you need more than 1 gigawatt of generating capacity for a given gigawatt of data centre demand).