Sam Altman's make-or-break year: can the OpenAI CEO cash in his bet on the future?

Altman's campaigning for his company coincides with its use of enormous present resources to serve an imagined future OpenAI CEO Sam Altman poses during the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Summit, at the Grand Palais, in Paris, on February 11, 2025. Sam Altman has claimed over the years that the advancement of AI could solve climate change, cure cancer, create a benevolent superintelligence beyond human comprehension, provide a tutor for every student, take over nearly half of the tasks in the economy and create what he calls "universal extreme wealth". In order to bring about his utopian future, Altman is demanding enormous resources from the present. As CEO of OpenAI, the world's most valuable privately owned company, he has in recent months announced plans for $1tn of investment into datacenters and struck multibillion-dollar deals with several chipmakers. If completed, the datacenters are expected to use more power than entire European nations .