Ziff Davis CEO: if OpenAI can find $750 billion for data centers, it can find money for publishers, too

Ziff Davis CEO says the Justice Department is overstating how hard it would be for AI companies to license news and other content. The company is one of the plaintiffs in a copyright case in the Southern District of New York, and the argument here is about markets, not the law itself.

The government has said licensing could make it “significantly more difficult” to build a strong AI industry. But the brief also says it takes no position on whether licensing would be financially or logistically feasible, and notes that both mainstream and independent publishers have already struck deals. That’s the part the Ziff Davis chief keeps coming back to: if the deals exist, where is the supposed obstacle?

The piece points to a bunch of newer services — Cloudflare, Tollbit, Really Simple Licensing, and the News Media Alliance — that are trying to make payments and permissions easier to handle. It also reaches back to music, where ASCAP and BMI helped create licensing systems that work for both big companies and individual creators. The message is simple enough. Licensing is a business arrangement, not some mystical barrier.

There is a sharper claim underneath all this. The article argues that AI firms are already spending absurd sums on compute, chips, and power, and that OpenAI has told investors it expects to spend $750 billion on compute by 2030. Against that backdrop, publisher fees look small. The author even compares them with U.S. music royalties, which are under $20 billion a year.

And there’s a warning for what happens if publishers don’t get paid. More of them will use paywalls and other barriers, which would squeeze access to free information and push costs onto readers. In that view, licensing isn’t a drag on AI. It’s the price of not turning the open web into a free training buffet forever.