Sam Altman engineered an escape route for OpenAI called Project Stargate, a $500 billion master plan for independent data centers.

In May 2015, Sam Altman emailed Elon Musk stating, "I think we need a Manhattan Project for AI."

OpenAI has long claimed to be compute constrained, with demand for ChatGPT supposedly exceeding supply, leading Sam Altman to sign many forward data center commitments.