Sam Altman believes wars will be fought over AI unless there's massive spending on infrastructure. But that comes with a cost.

In a Monday blog post, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman argued that massive investment in AI infrastructure is key to market dominance - and avoiding global conflict. 'If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips),' Altman wrote. 'If we don't build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over, and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people.'

While promoting the development of AI infrastructure is the new focus of industry leaders like Altman, researchers on the technology's social, environmental, and economic impacts told Business Insider that the development of the data centers and hardware systems needed to achieve artificial general intelligence will cost far more than money.

The new hot topic in artificial intelligence is infrastructure - investing in it, planning a massive expansion of computing power, and creating the data centers needed to develop the technology at scale. [...] a $30 billion fund to 'enhance American competitiveness in AI while meeting the growing need for energy infrastructure to power economic growth.'

Earlier this month, the White House hosted a roundtable with AI infrastructure leaders from around the country - including Altman and executives from Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Anthropic, among others - to 'discuss steps to ensure the United States continues.'

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