Altman says OpenAI will point its robotics program at building its own data centers

OpenAI's robotics program has its first job site, and the site belongs to OpenAI. "We have a robotics program that we're going to point at making lots of data centers," Sam Altman said on Cheeky Pint, the podcast of Stripe co-founder John Collison, published on Oct. 29. He listed it next to OpenAI's own chip and its effort to learn "how to build our own data centers."

That makes OpenAI the first customer for its own robots, with a large bill to aim them at. Altman put the five-year cost of installing and running one gigawatt of capacity at about $70 billion, a figure he offered as a round number. He also described "self-replicating data centers," where AI controls robots that "run fabs, and build turbines or solar panels, and build data centers," and said: "I think we have that within grasp."

On Oct. 18 the headline was a humanoid

Altman has said OpenAI is building a humanoid: "I think we'll have a cool demo in 2027," he said, as Robrief reported on Oct. 18. On the podcast, asked where high prices were pulling in new supply, he pointed to "some components for robots. And not the humanoid fake demos. But the industrial robots that can just make stuff faster." He was talking about the market, not OpenAI's road map. Still, building a data center is construction and assembly work, which is closer to the robot he praised than to a humanoid on a stage.

Collison's objection is the harder one

Collison pushed back that data centers are "permitting-bottlenecked and component-bottlenecked," not short of labour. Altman answered, "We could make more components with robots." When Collison added "Eventually," Altman agreed: "all of this is how we solve this over a long period of time."

So which arrives first from OpenAI's robotics team: the 2027 humanoid demo, or a robot working on an OpenAI building site?