The company also announced a $20 billion data center project in Georgia and hired a key figure from Elon Musk's xAI
Photo by Tomohiro Ohsumi / Getty Images
OpenAI has raised its projected spending on computing infrastructure to around $750 billion through 2030, up from roughly $600 billion earlier this year, according to The Wall Street Journal. New deals with cloud-computing providers are driving the higher figure, as OpenAI continues its push to obtain the vast computing resources its AI models require.
On Wednesday, OpenAI said it would invest $20 billion to begin construction on a data center called Project Camellia in Effingham County, Georgia. Unlike its other facilities, where the company leases chip capacity from providers such as Oracle $ORCL and Amazon $AMZN Web Services, the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub site marks OpenAI's first venture as the principal designer and builder of its own data center.
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. OpenAI has already acquired the land for the project and is in the process of selecting a partner to build and operate the site, Katti said.
The company has also hired Brent Mayo, a key figure in building Elon Musk's xAI data center infrastructure, according to the Journal. After departing xAI earlier this year, Mayo had been instrumental in standing up that company's Colossus supercomputer campus in Memphis, where he managed the rapid procurement and commissioning of large-scale AI chip clusters. In the head of data-center build and delivery role, he will be responsible for keeping cloud partners on track with their construction timelines, while also contributing to the new Georgia facility. Mayo reports to Uday Ruddarraju, who was promoted this month to become OpenAI's chief technology officer of computing capacity.
The $750 billion projection represents the latest escalation in a spending trajectory that has drawn scrutiny inside the company. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar has privately raised concerns that OpenAI may not be able to honor future computing contracts if revenue growth does not keep pace with commitments. That came after Chief Executive Sam Altman stated publicly that OpenAI intended to spend $1.4 trillion on computing capacity, a figure that unsettled observers; Friar subsequently stepped in to correct the record, telling investors the actual projected outlay through 2030 was approximately $600 billion.
Among the deals already on the books are a contract with Oracle covering 6 gigawatts of data-center capacity, an expanded arrangement with Amazon Web Services worth $138 billion across eight years, and a separate pledge of $250 billion in incremental spending through Microsoft $MSFT Azure. Power from the Effingham County facility would be additive to what OpenAI has already secured through its deals with other providers.
The spending trajectory has been a subject of broader attention as OpenAI moves toward a public listing. Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, disclosed during testimony in OpenAI's lawsuit with Elon Musk that the company's projected 2026 computing expenditure stands at $50 billion — up from roughly $30 million the company spent on computing in 2017. Separately, audited financial documents showed OpenAI lost $38.5 billion in 2025 while generating $13.07 billion in revenue, with total costs and expenses reaching $34 billion for the year.
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