- Sam Altman said AI would in the future be sold like electricity and water, metered by usage.
- "We see a future where intelligence is a utility," the OpenAI CEO said.
- Altman suggested demand is surging and compute will decide who gets access.
In the future, you could have another utility bill to pay for: artificial intelligence.
That's according to Sam Altman, who says AI will eventually be bought and sold as a basic utility like electricity and water that's metered by usage.
Speaking at the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, the OpenAI CEO said tech companies like his are building toward a future where intelligence is delivered on demand.
"Fundamentally our business and I think the business of every other model provider is going to look like selling tokens," Altman said, referring to the units AI systems use to process and price input and output data.
"We see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water and people buy it from us on a meter and use it for whatever they want to use it for," he added.
In that world, compute capacity determines who gets access — and demand for AI is only going up, Altman said. Compute capacity is the processing power required to train and run AI models, determined by infrastructure such as chips and data centers.
If OpenAI doesn't build enough compute capacity to meet demand, Altman said, it either "can't sell it or the price gets really high." That would push AI access toward the wealthy, or force governments to decide how limited compute should be distributed, he said.
The infrastructure sprint
Major tech companies are set to spend hundreds of billions of dollars this year on compute to meet soaring demand for AI.
In her keynote at CES 2026 in January, AMD CEO Lisa Su said the world will need more than "10 yottaflops" of compute — a scale 10,000 times larger than global AI capacity in 2022 — over the next five years to keep up with growth.
Powering that expansion is a significant infrastructure challenge.
AI data centers can consume as much electricity as small cities, and the strain on the US power grid — along with transformer shortages and slow permitting for transmission lines — could become a bottleneck.
In an episode of the "Moonshots with Peter Diamandis" podcast in January, Elon Musk said that electricity generation is now the limiting factor in scaling AI, predicting China could outpace the US in total AI compute because of its faster energy build-out.
Inside tech companies, compute is a valuable but sometimes scarce resource. Engineers are competing for access to GPUs, and some job candidates now ask about their AI compute budget alongside salary and equity.
Last December, OpenAI President Greg Brockman said the company, which has committed roughly $1.4 trillion on data center projects over the next eight years, wants "to be ahead of the curve," but said, "I don't think we will be, no matter how ambitious we can dream of being right now."
At the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit, Altman said the goal is to move away from a world of being "capacity constrained."
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