Sam Altman shuts down question about how OpenAI can commit to spending $1.4 trillion while earning billions: 'Enough'

Sam Altman appears tired of having to justify how OpenAI will pay for its trillion-dollar-plus spending commitments as a startup bringing in a fraction of that in annual revenue.

In a testy moment during a recent podcast interview with investor Brad Gerstner on the "Bg2 Pod," Altman was asked "the single biggest question" that is "hanging over the market."

"How can a company with $13 billion in revenues make $1.4 trillion of spend commitments?" Gerstner asked the OpenAI CEO. "You've heard the criticism, Sam."

OpenAI has invested heavily in infrastructure and compute, striking multi-billion-dollar deals to secure more Nvidia chips and energy to fuel its AI ambitions. The latest came Monday morning, when OpenAI announced a $38 billion partnership with AWS.

"If you want to sell your shares, I'll find you a buyer," Altman said in response to Gerstner's question. "Enough."

Altman disputed the $13 billion in OpenAI revenue that Gerstner listed before launching into a greater defense.

"I think there's a lot of people who talk with a lot of breathless concern about our compute stuff or whatever that would be thrilled to buy shares," Altman said. "We could sell your shares or anybody else's to some of the people who are making the most noise on Twitter about this very quickly."

AI bubble discourse on "Twitter" — now X, owned by Altman's friend-turned-foe Elon Musk — has reached a fever pitch amid tech companies' increasing capex spending. On Meta's recent earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company was intentionally "front-loading" compute. In the "very worst case," Zuckerberg said, Meta will have "pre-built for a couple of years."

"We do plan for revenue to grow steeply," Altman said on the podcast. "We are taking a forward bet that it's going to continue to grow."

Altman listed some of the company's bets: ChatGPT, consumer devices, its cloud business, and the automation of science. The company also recently announced a plan to monetize its viral Sora app by charging for additional AI video generations.

To push forward these bets, OpenAI has inked spending deals with several companies, some in the hundreds of billions. The deals range from chips to data centers, and include names like Nvidia, Oracle, and AMD.

"There are not many times I want to be a public company, but one of the rare times that it's appealing is when those people are writing these ridiculous, 'OpenAI is about to go out of business,'" Altman said on the podcast.

"I would love to tell them they could just short the stock, and I would love to see them get burned on that," he added.

Now that OpenAI has completed its restructuring plan and signed a new agreement with Microsoft, its largest investor, there have been murmurs of OpenAI's IPO aspirations. A recent Reuters report indicated that OpenAI was angling for an IPO at a $1 trillion valuation.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who was also on the podcast, broke out in laughter when Altman said he would help Gerstner sell OpenAI his shares. Later, Nadella chimed in as a "partner and an investor" to say that OpenAI's business execution has been "unbelievable."

"We carefully plan," Altman said. "We might screw it up. This is the bet that we're making, and we're taking a risk along with that."

"A certain risk is if we don't have the compute, we will not be able to generate the revenue," he said.

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