OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warns of "unsustainable silliness" in compute buildout

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warns of "unsustainable silliness" in compute buildout Matthias Bastian View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian Sep 3, 2026 OpenAI CEO Sam Altman thinks the AI infrastructure boom is getting reckless. In an interview , he called it "unsustainable silliness," pointing to neocloud providers announcing massive capacity without the revenue or customers to justify it. OpenAI's own expansion is profitable and backed by real demand, he assured. But too many others have a "cost is no object" mindset. "We're just going to build out crazy amounts of compute even at higher prices for it." OpenAI's own progress could make things worse, Altman says. If the company cuts costs and boosts efficiency fast enough, today's expensive buildouts turn into bad bets. A broad downturn could also strain OpenAI's ability to pay for capacity it already committed to, though he considers that risk manageable. OpenAI won't sell compute to third parties yet, but Altman didn't categorically rule it out. Whether his stance on compute has fundamentally shifted is hard to tell from these comments. But his tone is noticeably more cautious than before, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei accused him of "YOLO"-ing money into the compute buildout . Ad Ad AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section. Subscribe now Source: Sources Podcast Ask about this article… Search