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OpenAI is scaling up its data-center ambitions—and its budget for spending on them.
The artificial-intelligence company has raised its projected spending on computing power to around $750 billion through 2030, up from a projection of roughly $600 billion earlier this year, according to a person with knowledge of its projections.
The increase reflects new agreements with cloud-computing providers as OpenAI races to lock up the enormous amounts of computing capacity it needs to develop and run its AI models. OpenAI’s spending on cloud computing has become a central focus of Chief Executive Sam Altman’s leadership team and has been a source of tension between him and his chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, ahead of the company’s planned initial public offering.
The company said Wednesday it would invest $20 billion to kick off a data center called Project Camellia, in Effingham County, Ga. Sachin Katti, OpenAI’s vice president of compute strategy, said the company has contracted with utility Georgia Power to receive 3.2 gigawatts of power between 2028 and 2032. The project represents the first site in which OpenAI is the lead designer and developer. At its other sites, OpenAI rents chips from cloud providers such as Oracle and Amazon Web Services.
OpenAI has also hired Brent Mayo, one of the architects of Elon Musk’s data-center build-out, according to people with knowledge of the hire.
Mayo, who left Musk’s xAI earlier this year, played a key role in helping that company build its first Colossus supercomputer facility in Memphis, overseeing the work needed to rapidly install and bring online large clusters of AI chips.
As OpenAI’s head of data-center build and delivery, Mayo’s focus is on ensuring that data centers its cloud partners build are done on time. He will also be involved in the new Georgia data-center project.
Mayo reports to Uday Ruddarraju, who was promoted this month to become OpenAI’s chief technology officer of computing capacity. Ruddarraju, who reports to President Greg Brockman, also previously worked on xAI’s Colossus before leaving the startup for OpenAI last year.
Mayo’s hire is the latest in a series of changes inside OpenAI’s infrastructure organization, which has gone through several evolutions since Altman announced the company’s Stargate initiative at the White House in January 2025.
Altman originally envisioned Stargate as a joint venture with SoftBank and Oracle that would invest as much as $500 billion in U.S. artificial-intelligence infrastructure over four years.
But that effort struggled to get off the ground.
Now, OpenAI is reviving its internal effort to take more control over its data centers, people familiar with the matter said.The company is in the process of choosing a partner that will build and operate the Georgia site, Katti, the vice president of compute strategy, said in an interview. OpenAI has already acquired the land for the project.
Katti declined to share how much money OpenAI has paid Georgia Power to reserve the power but said it was a “meaningful amount,” which gives the utility the confidence to build additional generation capacity.
OpenAI executives have held meetings with local and state officials, as well as with schools and other community leaders, to gather feedback on their proposed data center, which will be located in the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub.
So far, the project has local support from the economic development group, the county manager, and the school district. Local officials said in a statement that they visited several data centers and did their own research before deciding to move forward.
The 3.2 gigawatts that OpenAI expects to eventually receive in Effingham County would come in addition to the computing deals the company has already signed with other partners.
It has previously contracted with Oracle for data-center capacity totaling 6 gigawatts, which is mostly still under development. At the end of February, OpenAI increased its multiyear cloud-computing deal with Amazon Web Services to $138 billion over eight years, including 2 gigawatts on Amazon’s homegrown AI chip, known as Trainium. OpenAI also last year committed an additional incremental $250 billion in cloud spending to Microsoft Azure, though it didn’t provide a timeline for that spending.
After Altman’s proclamation that OpenAI planned to spend $1.4 trillion on computing capacity set off concerns over the company’s financial stability, Friar, the CFO, walked back that claim, quietly reassuring investors that OpenAI planned to spend $600 billion through 2030.
She has also privately voiced concerns about Altman’s spending plans. Friar told company leaders she worried that the company might not be able to pay for future computing contracts if revenue doesn’t grow fast enough.
Write to Anissa Gardizy at [email protected]
