Liam Denning, Columnist

Altman’s AI Power Grab Is Tone Deaf and Infeasible

October 2, 2025 at 9:30 AM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

Dreaming big.
Photographer: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg

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Sam Altman may be a visionary but he could use some help reading the room.

The OpenAI chief executive officer has made yet more headlines for reportedly telling employees he targets 250 gigawatts of datacenter capacity by 2033. In power terms, that is like building a not-small country, equivalent to roughly one-third of peak demand on the entire US grid. This is the same US grid already morphing into a political third rail amid fast-rising bills and warnings of blackouts, with proliferating datacenters linked to both. A bit more nuance and creativity, plus a dash of realism, is in order.