OpenAI's Sam Altman is already looking at how much the company would like to spend after the $500 billion Stargate project.

Speaking on The Times of London's Tech Podcast, Altman suggested $5 trillion as a potential number. He also discussed Stargates in other countries, beyond the US, as well as buying other companies' infrastructure.

Stargate was announced on the first day of the Trump administration as a joint venture to deploy a number of large data centers across the US. OpenAI has partnered with Oracle, SoftBank, and Abu Dhabi's MGX on the venture, with $45bn currently set to be invested - although that requires OpenAI also raising money, which could be complicated by Elon Musk.

The project was almost immediately called into question by the launch of DeepSeek's cheaper AI models. While they were not trained as cheaply as initially believed, they still required much less infrastructure than OpenAI's approach, and narrowed its lead over the market.

"Maybe I should say, 'no one should build big compute clusters, it's all going to be super cheap,' but of course, we still think it's super important," Altman said in response to a question about DeepSeek.

"Stargate is a much bigger project, it is a $500bn project to build a very large training and inference system. It sounds crazy big now. I bet it won't sound that big in a few years."

He added: "And if we get to do it again, which I hope we do, you'll be like 'you're raising $5 trillion for a cluster, what the f**k?' And we'll be like, 'well yeah, you know, gotta keep going.'"

Stargate is currently set to be built out over four years, with the company exploring data center options in 16 states alongside its flagship Texas site. The company aims to develop five to ten campuses – each able to support 1GW of capacity or more.

Altman also said that he "would love to do a Stargate Europe," and that he had had promising conversations in the continent. More broadly, he said that governments around the world had reached out to talk to him about Stargates for their respective nations.

"I said 'yeah, we should totally talk about that, we could probably do it for you - what kind of scale [were you thinking]?'" Altman said that he was expecting $100-800m proposals, but was surprised to find that "there are some governments that are ready to like buy big pieces of AI infrastructure."

However, Altman accepted that "there'll be some booms and busts along the way" with AI data center buildouts, but suggested that the company may "get to go buy people's overbuilt infrastructure at like 10 cents on the dollar. I suspect we'll get a bite of that apple."

Not clear is what would happen to OpenAI's funding in such a bust period. The company has yet to post a profit, as infrastructure and staffing costs balloon.

In 2024, Altman was reportedly looking to raise as much as $7 trillion to control the entire AI chain - from data centers, to chip design, to chip manufacturing, to power infrastructure.

The US spent $4tn (adjusted for inflation) on WWII, Nvidia is worth $3.45tn, and TSMC costs about $871bn.