Sam Altman says OpenAI could own 100 million GPUs by the end of the year, estimated at $3 trillion worth of silicon — ChatGPT maker to cross 'well over 1 million' AI GPUs by end of year
Credit: Getty / Bloomberg
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman isn't exactly known for thinking small, but his latest comments push the boundaries of even his usual brand of audacious tech talk. In a new post on X, Altman revealed that OpenAI is on track to bring 'well over 1 million GPUs online' by the end of this year. That alone is an astonishing number—consider that Elon Musk's xAI, which made waves earlier this year with its Grok 4 model, runs on about 200,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. OpenAI will have five times that power, and it's still not enough for Altman going into the future. 'Very proud of the team...' he wrote, 'but now they better get to work figuring out how to 100x that lol.'
The 'lol' might make it sound like he's joking, but Altman's track record suggests otherwise. Back in February, he admitted that OpenAI had to slow the rollout of GPT‑4.5 because they were literally 'out of GPUs.' That wasn't just a minor hiccup; it was a wake-up call considering Nvidia is also sold out till next year for its premier AI hardware. Altman has since made compute scaling a top priority, pursuing partnerships and infrastructure projects that look more like national-scale operations than corporate IT upgrades. When OpenAI hits its 1 million GPU milestone later this year, it won't just be a social media flex—it'll be cementing itself as the single largest consumer of AI compute on the planet.
Anyhow, let's talk about that 100x goal, because it's exactly as wild as it sounds. At current market prices, 100 million GPUs would cost around $3 trillion—almost the GDP of the UK—and that's before factoring in the power requirements or the data centers needed to house them. There's no way Nvidia could even produce that many chips in the near term, let alone handle the energy requirements to power them all. Yet, that's the kind of moonshot thinking that drives Altman. It's less about a literal target and more about laying down the foundation for AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), whether that means custom silicon, exotic new architectures, or something we haven't even seen yet. OpenAI clearly wants to find out.
The biggest living proof of this is OpenAI's Texas data center, now the world's largest single facility, which consumes around 300 MW—enough to power a mid-sized city—and is set to hit 1 gigawatt by mid-2026. Such massive and unpredictable energy demands are already drawing scrutiny from Texas grid operators, who warn that stabilizing voltage and frequency for a site of this scale requires costly, rapid infrastructure upgrades that even state utilities struggle to match. Regardless, innovation must prevail, and the bubble shouldn't burst.
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