Sam Altman says cloud, chip and energy firms told OpenAI “You’re totally crazy” about AI buildout
“We started calling the clouds. We started calling chip fabs. We started calling energy providers and everyone's like, 'You're totally crazy. This is impossible. No industry has ever moved like this. We've been around. There's these booms and busts. It's not going to go up in a straight line. This is reckless,'”
Reported August 2, 2026 by businessinsider.com. Checked word for word against that report.
In a recent podcast interview, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recalled how his early Silicon Valley mentors shaped his investing philosophy, then connected it to OpenAI’s scramble for massive computing resources after GPT-4. He said he contacted cloud providers, semiconductor manufacturers, and energy suppliers about building infrastructure to match the company’s rapid AI model improvements, and they largely rejected the effort as unrealistic, reckless, and contrary to normal industry boom-and-bust cycles. Altman compared the experience to early-stage fundraising, saying most investors said no but a couple of yeses were enough to begin building. The comments shed light on the scale of resources OpenAI believes it needs and the resistance it faced from established industries.
- businessinsider.com ↗︎02 AUG 2026