USA OpenAI wants giant data centers

ChatGPT developer OpenAI wants to convince the US government to build huge data centers that consume as much electricity as a city, according to a media report. The company advertised the advantages of such facilities after a meeting at the White House.

According to the financial service Bloomberg, the aim is to develop better software with artificial intelligence and compete with China. Data centers with a power consumption of five gigawatts per year each in several US states are being discussed. This is the amount of electricity produced by five nuclear reactors and could supply around three million households. OpenAI wants to build such a facility first, according to sources close to the matter. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been campaigning for months to expand the infrastructure behind AI applications.

Just last weekend, it was announced that a nuclear reactor at the Three Mile Island power plant in the US, which was shut down five years ago, is to be restarted in order to supply data centers of OpenAI partner Microsoft. The reactor belongs to the American energy company Constellation.

Doubts from the energy sector

Meanwhile, Constellation CEO Joe Dominguez expressed doubts about a network of several five-gigawatt data centers. Not only has there never been anything like it before, "as an engineer, I don't think it's possible," he told Bloomberg.

ChatGPT from OpenAI is the chatbot that triggered the hype surrounding artificial intelligence over a year ago. Such AI programs are trained with huge amounts of information and can formulate texts at the linguistic level of a human, write software code and summarize information. The principle behind this is that they estimate word by word how a sentence should continue. Altman emphasizes that AI will also be able to take on much more complex tasks in the future.

SDA