AI companies have carried the US stock markets in the last couple of years, and AI could end up carrying entire GDPs of countries in the coming times.
OpenAI President Greg Brockman has painted a striking picture of compute power as the new economic frontier. His remarks connect OpenAI’s internal resource battles directly to a broader thesis about national economic competitiveness, suggesting that access to computational infrastructure could become as critical to prosperity as traditional factors like natural resources or educated workforces once were.
Brockman began by outlining OpenAI’s trajectory: “Looking backwards, we have been tripling our compute every single year for the past couple years, and we’ve also tripled our revenue. And the thing that we find within OpenAI is every time we want to release a new feature, we want to produce a new model, we want to bring this technology to the world, we have a big fight internally over compute because there are so many things we want to launch and produce for all of you that we simply cannot because we are compute constrained.”
This internal scarcity, he argued, foreshadows a larger economic reality. “I think we’re moving to a world where GDP growth will itself be driven by the amount of compute that is available in a particular country, in a particular region,” Brockman said. “And I think that we’re starting to see the first inklings of this. And I think over the next couple years we’ll see it start to hit in a real way.”
Addressing concerns about data center development, Brockman emphasized potential local benefits: “I think that AI is something where data centers can actually be very beneficial to local communities. I think that’s a really important thing for us to really prove to people.” He then connected AI’s promise to fundamental scientific progress: “The AI technology you produce, that is also something where in terms of scientific advances, you think about what has been the most fundamental driver of increase of quality of life. It really is about science and every time we’ve gone into specific domains, you just see how much limitation there is from how things are done because that’s just, there’s a particular discipline that’s built with much expertise. There are a small number of experts, and it’s hard for them to propagate that to future generations.”
Brockman’s comments arrive amid a global infrastructure arms race. The US recently announced the Stargate Project, a $500 billion private investment in AI infrastructure over four years involving OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle. Meanwhile, countries from the UAE to Singapore are making massive compute investments, recognizing that AI capability increasingly depends on raw processing power. The European Union has also accelerated efforts to build sovereign AI infrastructure to avoid dependence on US and Chinese tech giants. If Brockman’s prediction holds, nations that fail to secure adequate compute resources may find themselves at a structural economic disadvantage—not unlike countries that missed earlier waves of electrification or internet connectivity. The question, however, is whether compute access will democratize opportunity or concentrate power in nations and companies with the deepest pockets.