Sam Altman says AI infrastructure costs should fall to about $20B per gigawatt

OpenAI's CEO puts the five-year cost of one gigawatt of AI capacity at $70 billion and says it needs to come down sharply for the industry to scale Building the machinery behind artificial intelligence is staggeringly expensive. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman thinks the price tag needs to shrink by a lot. Altman says the five-year cost of building and operating one gigawatt of AI infrastructure should fall from $70 billion to about $20 billion. That is a cut of more than two-thirds, and it is a target, not a done deal. What Altman actually said The comments came during a recent podcast appearance. Altman framed the figure as total cost of ownership, or TCO, over five years. For AI data centers, that means chips, power delivery, facilities and the electricity to run them all. Altman’s current estimate for that full bundle is approximately $70 billion per gigawatt. He described a drop to about $20 billion as essential for the industry to scale in a healthier way. Altman pointed to two main levers. One is lower energy costs. The other is thinner margins across the supply chain. He expressed skepticism that simply eliminating those margins would be enough without parallel gains in energy effici...