Why Sam Altman Won't Be on the Hook for OpenAI's Spending Spree

OpenAI has gone wild with compute deals this year, committing to spend far more than its balance sheet can currently sustain. So who takes the fall if it can’t pay? It won’t be Altman.

By Rashi Shrivastava, Phoebe Liu, and Richard Nieva

Over the last few months, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been on a tear of dealmaking, announcing multibillion dollar agreements with the biggest tech companies in the world. There’s Oracle, Nvidia, Microsoft, AMD, Broadcom, and most recently, Amazon. He’s committed to spending a grand sum total of $1.4 trillion on datacenters in the coming years — an eyebrow-raising figure for a company which claims its annual revenue is projected to reach $20 billion this year, begging an all-important question for the entire tech industry, whose fate is now tied to OpenAI: What happens if he can’t pay?

At an event this week, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar seemed to suggest that the government could act as a “backstop” for the company’s commitments — comments she later walked back. And in a long-winded post on X, Altman addressed the question of what happens to OpenAI if its web of deals falls apart:

“If we screw up and can’t fix it, we should fail, and other companies will continue on doing good work and servicing customers,” Altman said. “...We of course could be wrong, and the market—not the government—will deal with it if we are.”

The odds don’t look great right now. In order to come through on its compute commitments, OpenAI’s revenue would have to grow to an estimated $577 billion by 2029, roughly the size of Google’s revenue that same year, Tomasz Tunguz, a general partner at Theory Ventures, wrote in a recent blog post. That’s a roughly 2900% jump from its current projections for 2025. “These are crazy numbers,” he told Forbes.

But OpenAI has options. One likely scenario is that the AI company pays for and utilizes only a portion of the compute it has booked, said D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria. In that case, companies like Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft, CoreWeave and others will most likely renegotiate the contracts and ensure they get at least some amount of business from OpenAI, especially if the alternative is getting none at all. “They don't want OpenAI