OpenAI’s Sam Altman is clarifying the company’s stance on government support after its finance chief floated federal guarantees for semiconductor funding, stressing that the US government should not bail out private AI players.
In a new post on X, Sam Altman pushes back on speculation that the firm is seeking taxpayer-backed rescue lines as it prepares to finance an AI buildout projected at a trillion-dollar scale.
He says OpenAI supports government investment in national compute capacity, but not guarantees for private projects.
“We do not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI datacenters. We believe that governments should not pick winners or losers, and that taxpayers should not bail out companies that make bad business decisions or otherwise lose in the market.”
Altman says building an AI-era infrastructure stack requires private risk-taking and points to the firm’s revenue trajectory as support for self-financing its expansion.
“We expect to end this year above $20 billion in annualized revenue run rate and grow to hundreds of billions by 2030. We are looking at commitments of about $1.4 trillion over the next eight years.”
He also addresses concerns about scale and systemic relevance, saying that failure should not shift losses onto the public sector.
“If we screw up and can’t fix it, we should fail, and other companies will continue on doing good work and servicing customers. That’s how capitalism works and the ecosystem and economy would be fine.”
Altman notes the firm has discussed government loan guarantees only in the context of domestic semiconductor efforts, framed as part of US industrial policy aimed at reshoring supply chains and boosting national capacity.
“The basic idea there has been ensuring that the sourcing of the chip supply chain is as American as possible in order to bring jobs and industrialization back to the US, and to enhance the strategic position of the US with an independent supply chain, for the benefit of all American companies.”
He adds that the urgency to scale remains tied to compute limits constraining product rollouts and research advances.
“Even today, we and others have to rate limit our products and not offer new features and models because we face such a severe compute constraint.”
Altman closes by reiterating that market forces, not public guarantees, should govern outcomes in the race to build next-generation systems.
“We plan to be a wildly successful company, but if we get it wrong, that’s on us.”
Altman’s statement comes after CFO Sarah Friar floated the idea that OpenAI was hoping the federal government would help guarantee financing for chips tied to its data-center buildout.
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