OpenAI’s AI spending spree has ballooned to $750B

OpenAI just moved the goalposts on its own ambition. The company confirmed Wednesday it plans to spend $750 billion on infrastructure through 2030, a jump of about 25% from its earlier estimate, according to the Wall Street Journal. The news lands at an odd moment, given that its flagship Stargate data center effort has reportedly stalled.

The first concrete piece of this new spending wave is Project Camellia, a $20 billion data center campus set to rise on 1,400 acres northwest of Savannah, Georgia. The site will draw at least 3.2 gigawatts from Georgia Power, with that generating capacity expected online sometime between 2028 and 2032. OpenAI says it will cover the full infrastructure and electric-service costs itself, a promise that matters because Georgia regulators adopted a rule last year barring utilities from passing new large-user costs onto other customers. Georgia Power, for its part, says OpenAI has agreed to cut its power draw by as much as 1 gigawatt during peak grid demand. Effingham County is also sweetening the deal with a 50% property tax abatement lasting 15 years.

What nobody's saying yet is exactly how all that power will be generated. OpenAI and Georgia Power didn't respond to TechCrunch's questions on the matter. But regulatory filings offer a hint. Georgia Power won approval in December to add nearly 9,885 megawatts of capacity, and the OpenAI deal represents roughly a third of that total, with the utility expecting everything under contract by the end of 2026. Most of the new capacity, per filings, will come from natural gas — about 5.8 gigawatts worth, a chunk of it from simple-cycle turbines that pollute more heavily. That addition alone would more than double Georgia Power's existing natural gas fleet, with batteries and solar filling in the rest.

Timing is where things get interesting. Grid power isn't expected until 2028, but OpenAI hasn't said when it plans to switch on its first GPU — and there's reason to think it could happen earlier. The company recently brought on Brett Mayo to run data center construction, and Mayo previously built xAI's Colossus facility in Memphis at a notoriously fast clip. That speed came with baggage: Colossus has been running dozens of natural gas turbines without permits, claiming exemption from federal clean air rules, a practice now being challenged in a lawsuit from the NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center.