AI could be billed like electricity, says OpenAI CEO Sam Altman

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes artificial intelligence could one day be billed like a utility service—paying for what you use. Speaking at an infrastructure summit in Washington, he explained that tech companies are shifting toward an "intelligence on demand" model. According to Altman, AI services might be sold similarly to electricity or water, with payments based on usage meters. He stated that AI model providers will essentially sell tokens—units of computation used to process user requests and generate responses.

In his view, people will eventually purchase computing resources just as they pay utility bills today. Users could apply AI across various scenarios, with costs tied to resource consumption. Computational power remains the key factor driving the industry's growth. This power depends on infrastructure like specialized chips and data centers. If companies fail to provide sufficient computing capacity, it could lead to limited access to services or sharp price increases. Altman noted that in such a scenario, access to advanced AI systems might primarily be available to affluent users or regulated by governments.

To meet rising demand, tech corporations are already investing hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure development. For instance, AMD CEO Lisa Su said at CES 2026 that the world may need over 10 yottaflops of computing power for AI tasks within the next five years—roughly 10,000 times the 2022 level.

However, expanding infrastructure faces significant challenges. AI data centers consume massive amounts of energy, comparable to small cities' power usage. Additionally, development is constrained by grid issues, transformer shortages, and slow construction of new power lines.

Elon Musk has also stated that electricity production could become the main limitation for further AI industry growth. OpenAI itself acknowledges the scale of the task. Company president Greg Brockman said the organization plans to invest about $1.4 trillion in data center development over the next eight years to keep pace with rapidly growing demand. Altman emphasized that the industry's primary goal is to overcome current constraints related to computational resource shortages.