OpenAI Needs $400B In The Next 12 Months

Summary

Hello readers! This premium edition features a generous free intro because I like to try and get some of the info out there, but the real indepth stuff is below the cut. Nevertheless, I deeply appreciate anyone subscribing.On Monday I will have my biggest scoop ever, and it'll go out on the free newsletter because of its scale. This is possible because of people supporting me on the premium. Thanks so much for reading.One of the only consistent critiques of my work is that I’m angry, irate, that I am taking myself too seriously, that I’m swearing too much, and that my arguments would be “better received” if I “calmed down.”Fuck that.Look at where being timid or deferential has got us. Broadcom and OpenAI have announced another 10GW of custom chips and supposed capacity which will supposedly get fully deployed by the end of 2029, and still the media neutrally reports these things as not simply doable, but rational.To be clear, building a gigawatt of data center capacity costs at least $32.5 billion (though Jensen Huang says the computing hardware alone costs $50 billion, which excludes the buildings themselves and the supporting power infrastructure, and Barclays Bank says $50 billion to $60 billion) and takes two and a half years. In fact, fuck it — I’m updating my priors. Let’s say it’s a nice, round $50 billion per gigawatt of data center capacity. $32.5 billion is what it cost to build Stargate Abilene, but that estimate was based on Crusoe’s 1.2GW of compute for OpenAI being part of a $15 billion joint venture, which meant a gigawatt of compute runs about $12.5 billion, and Abilene’s 8 buildings are meant to hold 50,000 NVIDIA GB200 GPUs and their associated networking infrastructure, so let’s say a gigawatt is around 333,333 Blackwell GPUs at $60,000 a piece, so about $20 billion a gigawatt. However, this mathematics assumed that every cost associated would be paid by the Joint Venture. Lancium, the owner of the land that is allegedly building the power infrast...