OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has a lofty new vision to “create a factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week.”
His Tuesday blog post is light on details, but it’s safe to say he’s talking about finding ways to satisfy the company’s never-ending need for more computing power for its latest products.
On the one hand, by using the word “factory,” Altman may be suggesting he wants to create a slick manufacturing facility where robots assemble ultra-powerful GPUs day and night. OpenAI announced a partnership with Nvidia this week, which the companies are calling the “biggest AI infrastructure deployment in history.” Nvidia will provide “millions” of GPUs to help “scale OpenAI’s compute with multi-gigawatt data centers.”
On the other hand, it’s also possible that Altman’s factory might just be a data center, perhaps many of them. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang often refers to data centers as AI factories, portraying them as the engine behind the next wave of industrialization. But in reality, they are mostly glorified equipment warehouses.
Altman admits that producing a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week is “extremely difficult [and will] take us years” to figure out. Financing is another hurdle to overcome.
But for the sake of argument, let’s say Altman could achieve what he’s laid out. What would it look like to physically manifest a gigawatt of computing power every week? How much space would that take up?
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The newest, most advanced data centers are massive. An Amazon data center in Indiana is 1,200 acres, The New York Times reports, enough to fit 10 Malls of America. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to build data centers large enough to cover most of Manhattan.
To estimate how much land OpenAI would need to build a one-gigawatt facility with today’s technology, we can look at the acreage of its Texas data center, which is currently under development as part of the Stargate project. According to developer Crusoe, that project is “approximately 4 million square feet, and a total power capacity of 1.2 gigawatts (GW).” It will consume as much electricity as an entire city on its own.
If OpenAI is getting 1.2 gigawatts out of 4 million square feet, that means to build one gigawatt, it currently needs 3.33 million square feet. That’s the equivalent of about 60 football fields. Every football field needs extra room around it for a snack stand and bleachers. Data centers will also need some extra padding around the edge for things like parking or equipment storage (probably not for buying hot dogs).
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Altman says the extra compute power is necessary to make “amazing things” possible, such as curing cancer or figuring out “how to provide customized tutoring to every student on Earth.” If computing power is limited, “we’ll have to choose which one to prioritize; no one wants to make that choice, so let’s go build.”
Yet OpenAI published a study last week that found 73% of ChatGPT conversations are not about work, curing cancer, or education. They are mostly people seeking help with decisions in their personal lives.
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More Land Than You Can Imagine, But Very Few Jobs
Given their size—and horizontal versus vertical design—the facilities are often built in rural areas with vast expanses of open land. But while major companies moving into a town often translates into new jobs, data centers don’t need hundreds of humans to man a production line.
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Amazon’s $20 billion data center investment in Northeast Pennsylvania, for example, will employ 1,250 people across dozens of facilities. By comparison, Ford’s $5 billion EV factory announced in August will employ 4,000 between two plants in Kentucky and Michigan.
A data center in Ashburn, Virginia, behind a stream and woodland. (Credit: Gerville / iStock / Getty Images Plus via Getty Images)
That’s not to say that progress is not a noble goal. But the reality is that data centers are inefficient, guzzling water and consuming huge amounts of electricity.
Local communities across the US are fighting back, as reported by many publications, including Futurism, NPR, CNET, and the Washington Post. There is no shortage of horror stories, like a 24/7 hum coming from the buildings, keeping Virginia residents up at night, Business Insider reports, or when kitchen taps ran dry in Georgia after Meta built a facility nearby, The New York Times reports.
Since the grid does not have enough power, some areas are seeing enormous spikes in utility bills, up to 20% in the Northeast, as residents compete with data centers. That might be why Altman refers to quickening “new energy production” in his blog post as well.
For Big Tech, it’s all worth it. Data centers are giant moneymakers, or “the literal key to increasing revenue,” as Altman puts it. That’s why there is no shortage of new buildouts announced every week. The Trump administration, meanwhile, is working on slashing red tape to help tech companies build data centers faster.
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