On the ground in Texas for Sam Altman’s power trip: What I saw inside OpenAI’s gigawatt arms race

Altman’s pitch is simple: more compute, more power, more AI. What that looks like on the ground is staggering.

The sheer scale of OpenAI’s Stargate data center site in Abilene, Texas is staggering.

I wish I knew how to describe it, but nothing seems to do it justice. The photos, the drone video, nothing.

That’s why I hopped on a plane to Dallas, rented a car, and drove nearly three hours through rolling hills, ranches, cow herds and wind farms to see it for myself.

As I reported on the ground from Abilene, Texas on Tuesday, the media event I was invited to was victory lap of sorts, as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Oracle’s new co-CEO Clay Magouryk pushed back against critics who have questioned the progress of their high-profile and ambitious “Stargate” AI infrastructure project. Turns out they were touting an expansion of the Abilene site, as well as plans to build five massive, new data center complexes across the U.S. over the next several years. Altogether, the initiative calls for hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in a project of a mind-boggling scale.

So let’s play a game, so you can get what I’m talking about.

OpenAI’s Stargate site in Abilene is so big…
How big is it?
It’s so big that a crew of 6,400 workers have already moved massive amounts of soil to flatten the hills, and laid down enough fiber optic cable to wrap the Earth 16 times.

OpenAI’s Stargate site in Abilene is so big…
How big is it?
It’s so big that they built a six lane highway around the site — four for cars and two for trucks.

OpenAI’s Stargate site in Abilene is so big…
How big is it?
It’s so big that the traffic in Abilene during shift changes can cause delays of 45 minutes around town.

Finally, OpenAI’s Stargate site in Abilene is so big that, as I discussed in today’s Fortune Eye on AI newsletter (sign up for free issues to your inbox!), even Sam Altman seems to have trouble communicating the scale of what he’s talking about.

For one thing, I noticed that he and others in this mega data center world are constantly talking in terms of gigawatts these days, rather than the number of GPUs that will be housed in the buildings. That’s because, Altman told me after I walked up to him before the official press Q&A, the scale of these build-outs has become so large that there needs to be a different way to measure AI capacity. The unit of measure has become gigawatts: how much electricity the entire fleet of chips consumes. That number is shorthand for the only thing that matters: how much compute the company can keep running. That’s why speakers at the event in Abilene kept pointing to a number: 10 gigawatts of capacity across the Stargate project sites by the end of 2025.

That’s why it was so striking to come home from Texas and read Alex Heath’s Sources the very next day. In it, Heath revealed an internal Slack note Altman had shared with employees on the same day I saw him in Abilene. Altman spelled out what he called OpenAI’s “audacious long-term goal”: to build not 10, not 100, but a staggering 250 gigawatts of capacity by 2033. In the note, he disclosed that OpenAI started the year at “around” 230 megawatts of capacity and is “now on track to exit 2025 north of 2GW of operational capacity.”

To put that into perspective: 250 gigawatts would be about a quarter of the entire U.S. electrical generation capacity, which hovers around 1,200 GW. And Altman isn’t just talking about electricity. The number is shorthand for the entire industrial system required to use it: the chips, the data centers, the cooling and water, the networking fiber and high-speed interconnects to tie millions of processors into supercomputers.

All of this made the entire day in Abilene feel otherworldly. The group of reporters, which also included folks from Wired, AP, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, stayed at a hotel in downtown Abilene — a small city of 125,182 — and our bus was escorted by police from the hotel to the data center site.

It only took us 10 minutes to get from downtown to the site — I was told that they purposely avoided the shift change traffic I mentioned above.

Once on site, we were directed to add hardhats, vests and gloves and headed out on the bus again for a tour of the outside — I know I look silly, but they insisted and who could resist a photo:

There are only two buildings — 1 and 2 — completed. There will ultimately be eight, which will all be connected with fiber cables to create one massive supercomputer. The rest is in various stages of construction:

Once back inside, we took a tour of the inside of the actual data center hall within Building 2, which included long rows of racks of GPUs, with flashing lights that showed they were (presumably) working. But the powers-that-be said we could not take any photos or video of the inside (we had to hand them over while we went through!)

Sort of reminded me of the Matrix, though lol 😂

After the tour, and some time to work on stories, we were bussed to another building for the press event where Altman and Magouryk spoke, as well as other guests and speakers including Senator Ted Cruz, Congressman Jodey Arrington, and local dignitaries including the mayor of Abilene and even a county judge. Each emphasized Texas’ appeal as a hub for AI infrastructure. “Sam, Clay, welcome to Silicon Prairie,” Arrington said on stage, referring to the CEOs of OpenAI and Oracle.

Was Sam Altman giving me the side-eye here? I’m not sure…

Finally, it was time to head back to Dallas. Once back in the hotel, I got back in my rental car and drove over the rolling hills of West Texas once more, enjoying the big Texas sky.

As I wrote in Eye on AI today, no one can predict what’s going to happen with the gigawatt AI arms race that is just getting started in Abilene and beyond. My greater concern is that there isn’t nearly enough public awareness of what’s happening here. I don’t mean just in Abilene, with its mesquite shrubland ground into dust, or even OpenAI’s expanding Stargate ambitions. I mean the vast, almost unimaginable infrastructure buildout across Big Tech — the buildout that’s propping up the stock market, fueling a data center arms race with China, and reshaping energy, land, and labor around the world. Are we sleepwalking into the equivalent of an AI industrial revolution—and not a metaphorical one, but in terms of actual building of physical stuff—without truly reckoning with its costs versus its benefits?

Even Sam Altman doesn’t think enough people understand what he’s talking about. “Do you feel like people understand what ‘compute’ is?” I asked him outside of Building 2. That is, does the average citizen really grok what Altman is saying about the physical manifestation of these mega data centers?

“No, that’s why we wanted to do this,” he said about the Abilene media event. “I don’t think when you hit the button on ChatGPT…you think of walking the halls here.”

While Altman talked about walking the newly-built halls filled with racks of AI chips, I walked away unsettled about what comes next.