{"id":126173,"date":"2025-11-07T03:55:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-07T03:55:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/126173\/"},"modified":"2025-11-07T03:55:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T03:55:13","slug":"did-sam-altman-just-announce-an-openai-cloud-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/126173\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Sam Altman Just Announce an OpenAI Cloud Service?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sam Altman<\/a> cleared up some misunderstandings from the social media echo chamber on Thursday. While doing so, the OpenAI CEO<\/a> seemed to announce a potentially huge new business for the startup.<\/p>\n

“We are also looking at ways to more directly sell compute capacity to other companies (and people); we are pretty sure the world is going to need a lot of ‘AI cloud’, and we are excited to offer this,” Altman wrote on X.<\/p>\n

This suggests OpenAI may be looking to become a cloud provider<\/a> in its own right. That would put the AI startup into direct competition with cloud giants Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform.<\/p>\n

I’ve never seen OpenAI talk so clearly about building a business like this. I asked spokespeople at the startup for comment and any clarifications, but didn’t hear back by publication time.<\/p>\n

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar<\/a> may have hinted at something like this back in September. In a warning shot over future competition, she said cloud providers have been “learning on our dime,” and she wants to ensure OpenAI isn’t giving away<\/a> its AI know-how to these tech giants.<\/p>\n

How will OpenAI pay?<\/p>\n

While Altman’s comments on Thursday were designed to correct misunderstandings, he also addressed a much more important question hanging over the entire market: How will OpenAI pay for more than $1 trillion in AI infrastructure deals it’s signed lately?<\/p>\n

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One potential way would be to become a major cloud provider. At scale, these businesses are unprecedented money machines<\/a>. If you’re going to spend over $1 trillion on AI chips, networking gear, and huge data centers, one way to get a relatively quick return on that is by renting out these computing resources to other companies.<\/p>\n

This is why investors are (relatively!) less concerned about Microsoft, Amazon, and Google right now. They already have huge cloud business models that generate returns on their infrastructure spending.<\/p>\n

If you don’t have a cloud business, the future looks murkier. Take Meta<\/a>, for example. While it’s also spending billions of dollars on data centers and technical gear, it doesn’t have a cloud service, and therefore lacks a clear way to achieve a quick return on this heavy investment. This is part of the reason Meta shares slumped<\/a> recently. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t have a clear enough answer (yet?) for how all this infrastructure investment will pay off.<\/p>\n

OpenAI is arguably in a tighter spot than Meta right now. Building a serious cloud business could assuage some investor concern over AI’s return on investment<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Sign up for BI’s Tech Memo newsletter here<\/a>. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sam Altman cleared up some misunderstandings from the social media echo chamber on Thursday. While doing so, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":126174,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,17760,218,219,2356,74368,3653,74373,74372,74369,61,60,31494,74370,74371,74367,7689,1729,80,2232,15722],"class_list":{"0":"post-126173","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-chip","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-business-insider","13":"tag-cloud-provider","14":"tag-comment","15":"tag-future-competition","16":"tag-heavy-investment","17":"tag-huge-datum-center","18":"tag-ie","19":"tag-ireland","20":"tag-openai-ceo","21":"tag-openai-cloud-service","22":"tag-other-company","23":"tag-quick-return","24":"tag-sam-altman","25":"tag-startup","26":"tag-technology","27":"tag-thursday","28":"tag-way"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126173\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/126174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}