The AI Race *Just* Got Started

Author

Wes Roth
September 23, 2025

So Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI just went all in on scaling compute

The numbers are, in a word, staggering.

Both companies are “speed running” to 10GW compute clusters, basically 10x-ing anything we have now. Full Video:

Sam Altman published the following in his blog post:

Our vision is simple: we want to create a factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week. The execution of this will be extremely difficult; it will take us years to get to this milestone and it will require innovation at every level of the stack, from chips to power to building to robotics.

Yesterday NVIDIA announced a deal with OpenAI to build at least 10GW of compute and starting getting it online at the end of 2026.

Just today, OpenAI announced this

Announcing 5 new Stargate sites with Oracle and SoftBank, putting us ahead of schedule on the 10-gigawatt commitment we announced in January.

Meanwhile Elon is saying that it’s xAI that will be first to reach 10GW, 100GW, 1TW etc

This AI race is just getting started. Tons of questions about how this much data centers will be brought online, how we will fix the electricity bottlenecks etc.

Also a lot of people are posting images of a certain centipede (ifkyk) that illustrates how the money is circulating between the various companies involved…

We covered that a bit on the livestream with the SVIC Podcast, I come in at about 12 minutes if you’re interested:

All in all, things are heating up…

stay frosty,

-Wes Roth

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