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Cheeky Pint · 3 min · Oct 29, 2026

Altman wants five-year gigawatt costs down from $70B to $20B

Sam Altman · CEO, OpenAI

Sam Altman says a gigawatt's five-year cost is roughly $70B and argues $20B would be better.

In this episode

Full analysis
  1. 11:14Agent teams may improve both capability and alignmentPro pick 3 min
  2. 16:12AI math breakthroughs put discovery and researchers in tension7 min
  3. 42:41Personal agents could make business interfaces less important4 min
  4. 26:56Memory makers are cautious because past cycles punished capacity investment3 min
  5. 31:38Math-training methods may transfer to AI research3 min
  6. 0:06AI scans may uncover more serious software vulnerabilities3 min
  7. 37:42Altman wants five-year gigawatt costs down from $70B to $20B3 min
  8. 4:33OpenAI favors iterative deployment to keep people in control3 min
“if that number were like 20 instead of 70, we should be much happier.”
Sam Altmanat 39:00 · Cheeky Pint
39:00

Takeaways

  1. A gigawatt's five-year total cost is about $70B today.
  2. Altman says $20B would be a better target.
  3. Cheaper energy and supply-chain inputs are needed to get there.

About this segment

Sam Altman says a gigawatt's five-year cost is roughly $70B and argues $20B would be better. Getting there requires cheaper energy and lower supply-chain costs.

Sam Altman

Sam Altman is CEO of OpenAI.

Co-founded OpenAI and has led it since 2019, overseeing ChatGPT's launch; formerly president of Y Combinator.

  • John Collison, Host · Co-founder & president, Stripe

    Sold his first startup, Auctomatic, at 17, then co-founded Stripe in 2010.

From “Why Sam Altman is against a single superintelligence”, Oct 29, 2026. Watch the full episode

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 37:49

    there are more companies, the problem of not using enough AI rather than using too much AI. Do the dollars per gigawatt of leading-edge AI go up or down? That should go down. Down? That should go down. Why? Because it's gone up to this point, right? I mean, the reason it could go up is that if AI just gets increases in value per what it can do per watt so quickly, and there's such a supply shortage that people are willing to spend much more.

  2. 38:15

    But you would view that as compute not keeping up. But I would view that as compute not keeping up. And if I look at the fundamental cost of turning the sand into intelligence, that should go down. The cost of energy should go down. The cost of chips should go down. The rest of the cost of the supply chain should go down. If it doesn't go down, I'll be very sad. But for it to go down, given how much value there is in this, supply has got to go way up.

  3. 38:38

    Okay, so you would like to see a compute glut where we start producing a lot more memory, a lot more data centers, a lot more of all the inputs. And as a result, anyone who owns a computer for whatever reason can have one. People give different numbers for the kind of the cost per gigawatt measured in like the five-year total cost of ownership right now. But like, let's say, let's pick $70 billion as a number.

  4. 39:01

    I think if that number were... That's the cost to install. And run it for five years. Yep, okay. I think if that number were like 20 instead of 70, we should be much happier. And we should still demand to get, you know, 10x better performance out of it with smarter models every year. Presumably you don't think, like, 2 is a good number. Like, something's gone wrong if we're seeing 2 because it would be surprising if we were...

  5. 39:24

    Or is 2 better than 20? Why is it not? Like, I don't think that will happen. But why do we not want that number to be as low as possible? I don't know. This is your theory. You have a view that generally deflationary technology is good. I do believe in that. Yeah, I'm pro-deflation in a sense. Pro-deflationary technology. So how are we going to get there? What's going to happen between now? Well, $2 a gigawatt, I can't imagine.

  6. 39:45

    Okay, what's going to happen between now and $20 a gigawatt? $20 billion. $20 a gigawatt would be really great. Okay, yeah, $20 billion a gigawatt. Even to get down to $20, you're getting into the realm of energy's got to get cheaper. But certainly, like, all of the gross margin stacking that happens between melting... or the equivalent of melting sand and getting the token back, a lot of that's got to get compressed.

  7. 40:04

    You could just get there with eliminating profits, or do you need to also make the energy cheaper? I don't know the math off the top of my head. I mean, if you assumed all materials were free and no one made a profit, maybe you could get there in the current energy envelope, but only just. I see.