On May 12, 2026, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman arrived at the federal court in Oakland, California, on the day of the trial of Elon Musk’s lawsuit regarding OpenAI’s commercialization.
Carlos Barria | Reuters
OpenAI on Tuesday announced a new product called “Guaranteed Capacity” that allows customers to secure long-term access to compute to power their artificial intelligence products, agents and workflows.
According to the company’s website, customers can choose a one-, two-, or three-year contract period, and the discount increases with the annual contract amount.
“Customers increasingly want certainty around capacity, and as our models improve, we expect the world to be capacity constrained for some time,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a post on X.
Altman said he hopes the new service will help OpenAI with its future plans and that it will be a “huge win-win.” He added that OpenAI will provide guaranteed capacity until the current allocation is exhausted, but plans to offer it again in the future.
In the AI industry, compute refers to the computational power and resources required to train and run AI models at scale. Very expensive and difficult to build at scale. As CNBC previously reported, OpenAI told investors it aims to bring total computing spending to roughly $600 billion by 2030.
OpenAI is valued at more than $850 billion by individual investors, and is aiming for even more revenue with a major IPO planned as early as this year. The company closed a flurry of multibillion-dollar computing deals late last year, rattling Wall Street and sparking a debate about how OpenAI could pay for such large-scale infrastructure developments.
Altman has repeatedly dismissed concerns, writing in a November post on X that OpenAI expects revenue to grow to hundreds of billions of dollars by 2030. The company’s new guaranteed capacity program could help lay the foundation for what its computing business model will eventually look like.
Altman said in a post Tuesday that OpenAI will have plenty of capacity available for its products, including ChatGPT and coding assistant Codex.
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