Altman calls data center competition ‘unsustainable silliness’

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described recent investments in AI infrastructure as “unsustainable silliness,” saying that cloud companies are announcing large amounts of new compute without having the customer base or revenue to support it. They’re acting like “cost is no object,” he said.

It’s an interesting turnaround for Altman, who was himself recently accused of “YOLO investing” in compute (most famously by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei). But OpenAI is now placing its bets on improving efficiencies: As inference costs drop, competitors’ costly data centers will become unprofitable before they turn a profit.