Altman promised AI would 'fix the climate' — four months later OpenAI announced a $500B / four-year compute build-out, beginning with $100B and a Texas data-center campus
"In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents. AI will contribute to the world by … fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics. With enough compute, we believe we can solve any problem that requires intelligence, including most of humanity's problems."
Today, we're announcing The Stargate Project — a new company that intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States. We will begin deploying $100 billion immediately. The initial equity funders are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. The first site is already under construction in Texas. — OpenAI announcement — Announcing The Stargate Project, January 2025. source ↗
Altman's September 2024 "Intelligence Age" essay framed climate repair as a downstream consequence of scaling AI compute. Four months later OpenAI announced the Stargate joint venture: $500 billion in AI infrastructure capex over four years, with the first $100B already being deployed and the first site under construction. Public reporting on the announced Texas campus (Abilene) indicates planned power draw on the order of 1.2 GW — running 24/7 that's ~10.5 TWh per year per campus. At the platform's declared baseline of 10,500 kWh per US suburban household per year, one Stargate campus continuously equals the annual electricity of ~1.0 million US suburban households. Stargate is currently announced for multiple campuses. The mechanism by which this footprint repairs the climate is not specified in either document.
Baseline: 2024 US suburban household consumption: 10,500 kWh electricity / 109,500 gal water / 16 tonnes CO2e per year. · Methodology · How this is verified