OpenAI has already lined up enormous long-term commitments — over $500 billion through initiatives like Stargate for U.S. data centers, $250 billion in spending on Microsoft Azure cloud services, and tens of billions on AMD’s plan to deliver 6 GW of Instinct GPUs. Meanwhile, Oracle has financed its role in Stargate with at least $18 billion in corporate bonds plus another $9.6 billion in bank loans, and analysts expect its total capital need for these AI data centers could climb toward $100 billion.

The risk is straightforward: if OpenAI falls behind or can’t generate enough revenue to support these commitments, it would struggle to honor its long-term agreements. That failure would cascade. Oracle, for example, could be left with massive liabilities and no matching revenue stream, putting pressure on its ability to service the debt it already issued.

Given the scale and systemic importance of these projects — touching energy grids, semiconductor supply chains, and national competitiveness — it’s not hard to imagine a future where government intervention becomes necessary. Even though Altman insists he won’t seek a bailout, the incentives may shift if the alternative is a multi-company failure with national-security implications.

OpenAI doesn't have $500 billion in commitments lined up, it's promising to spend that much over 5 years... That's a helluva big difference than having $500B in revenue incoming.

This is all based on the LLM architecture that likely can't reach AGI.

If they aren't developing in parallel an alternative architecture than can reach AGI, when a/some companies develop such a new model, OpenAI are toast and all those juicy contracts are kaput.

I'm hoping for Congressional gridlock to save us from bailing out a cascading failure. The harder it hits, the better.

most of them are non binding letters of intent, i don't think it's as trite as you put it

> the incentives may shift if the alternative is a multi-company failure with national-security implications.

Sounds like a golden opportunity for GOOG to step over the corpse of OpenAI and take over for cents on the dollar all of the promises the now defunct ex-leader of AI made.

Last week's announced Genesis Mission from the Department of Energy could be the vehicle for this bailout.

1. Government will "partner" (read: foot the bill) for these super-strategic datacenters and investments promised by OpenAI.

2. The investments are not actually sound and fail, but it's the taxpayer that suffers.

3. Mr. Altman rides off into the sunset.

Isn't the NVIDIA-TSMC duopoly the problem here?

The cost of these data centers and ongoing inference is mostly the outrageous cost of GPUs, no?

I don't understand why the entire industry isn't looking to diversify the GPU constraint so that the hardware makers drop prices.

Why no industry initiative to break NVIDIA's strangehold and next TSMC's?

Or are GPUs a small line item in the outrageous spend companies like OpenAI are committing to?