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Six thousand workers arrive daily at an OpenAI construction site in West Texas. That’s more people than the company employs worldwide. Dust blankets the area. Rain turns the roads to mud, then the sun bakes them hard again. Sam Altman stood there in September watching it all. “This is what it takes to deliver AI,” Altman told CNBC on site in September. “Unlike previous technological revolutions or previous versions of the internet, there’s so much infrastructure that’s required. And this is a small sample of it.” Each site costs around $50 billion. OpenAI’s Stargate program totals near $850 billion across all locations. The Abilene campus has one data center running already. Another’s almost done. CFO Sarah Friar said it could eventually push past one gigawatt of capacity, enough electricity for about 750,000 homes. “The shovels that are going in the ground here today, they’re really about compute that comes online in 2026,” she said in September. “That first Nvidia push will be for Vera Rubins, the new frontier accelerator chips. But then it’s about what gets built for ’27, ’28, and ’29. What we see today is a massive compute crunch.” Altman didn’t hide the company’s hunger for more. “We are growing faster than any business I’ve ever heard of before,” Altman said, squinting against the sun. “And we would be way bigger now if we had way more capacity.” OpenAI is not the only one building Mark Zuckerberg’s putting up Hyperion in Louisiana. Four million square feet. Uses more power than New Orleans. Google is breaking ground in Arkansas on what state officials call the largest private investment in their history. Elon Musk built his Colossus supercomputer in Memphis in just 122 days. Now he’s expanding with Colossus 2, shooting for one million GPUs. Microsoft is dropping over $7 billion in…

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Filed under: News - @ January 1, 2026 11:24 am