'OpenAI's $750 Billion Bet': The biggest infrastructure gamble in corporate history

OpenAI is now planning to spend three-quarters of a trillion dollars on computing infrastructure by 2030. Its own chief financial officer is not sure the company can afford it.

The New Number

According to The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI has raised its projected compute spending through 2030 to approximately $750 billion — up from the roughly $600 billion figure it had communicated to investors earlier this year. The increase reflects both new infrastructure deals and expanded commitments on existing ones, as the company's appetite for computing power continues to accelerate faster than even its own projections.

To put the number in context: $750 billion exceeds the entire gross domestic product of Switzerland. It is more than the combined market capitalisation of most Fortune 500 companies. And it is being planned by a company that, by its own most recent disclosure, is not yet profitable.

Project Camellia

The centrepiece of the new spending is Project Camellia, a $20 billion data centre in Effingham County, Georgia, that OpenAI announced this week. It marks the first time the company is designing and building its own data centre rather than leasing capacity from cloud providers — a transition from tenant to landlord that signals OpenAI's belief that it will need more compute than any existing provider can supply.

The Georgia facility includes a 3.2-gigawatt power contract — roughly the electricity consumption of a city of two million people. The scale of the power requirement alone illustrates why OpenAI's infrastructure ambitions are becoming as much an energy story as a technology story.

The Contracts On The Books

Project Camellia sits within a broader web of infrastructure commitments that OpenAI has assembled over the past year. Among the deals already signed: a contract with Oracle covering 6 gigawatts of data centre capacity, an expanded arrangement with Amazon Web Services worth $138 billion across eight years, and a separate pledge of $250 billion in incremental spending through Microsoft Azure.

Each of these contracts individually would rank among the largest infrastructure deals in corporate history. Combined, they represent a bet on future computing demand that has no precedent in any industry.

The CFO's Concern

Not everyone inside OpenAI shares the confidence. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar has privately raised concerns that the company may not be able to honour its future computing contracts if revenue growth does not keep pace with the commitments being made, according to the Journal's reporting.

The concern is not abstract. OpenAI's compute contracts are binding obligations. If the company's revenue — currently driven primarily by ChatGPT subscriptions and API access — does not grow fast enough to cover the payments, OpenAI would face a cash crisis even as it sits on some of the most advanced technology in the world.

Friar's involvement became publicly visible earlier when CEO Sam Altman stated that OpenAI intended to spend $1.4 trillion on computing capacity — a figure that unsettled investors. Friar subsequently stepped in to correct the record, telling investors the actual projected outlay through 2030 was approximately $600 billion. That number has now risen to $750 billion, suggesting the trajectory Friar was trying to moderate is accelerating beyond her corrections.

The Strategic Logic

OpenAI's spending makes sense only under one assumption: that demand for AI compute will continue to grow faster than supply for the rest of the decade. If that assumption holds, every dollar spent on infrastructure today secures capacity that will be worth multiples tomorrow. If it does not, OpenAI will be locked into contracts for computing power it cannot use and cannot afford.

The company that started as a non-profit research lab less than a decade ago is now making the largest infrastructure bet in corporate history — and its own finance chief is on record worrying about whether the maths works.