OpenAI’s compute bill grew by around $150 billion in the space of a few months. The company has lifted projected spending on computing infrastructure to approximately $750 billion through 2030, up from the roughly $600 billion figure it gave investors earlier in 2026, The Wall Street Journal reported on 22 July.

The number arrives in the middle of a shortage OpenAI has spent the year describing in public. Chief financial officer Sarah Friar has said the company is turning down work it cannot support on the compute it has, and the campus announced alongside the new figure will not draw its first electricity until 2028. That gap, between money committed now and capacity delivered later, is the part that reaches marketing teams. It sets what AI tooling costs and how much of it is available across the next two budget cycles.

What has OpenAI committed to build in Georgia?

OpenAI said on 22 July that it will invest $20 billion in Project Camellia, a data centre campus spanning 1,400 acres at the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub in Effingham County, Georgia. The site is the first the company will design and build itself rather than leasing chip capacity from Oracle, Amazon Web Services or Microsoft. Sachin Katti, OpenAI’s vice-president of compute strategy, said the company has contracted with the utility Georgia Power for 3.2 gigawatts, phased in between 2028 and 2032.

The terms are unusually explicit about who pays for what. OpenAI said it would “pay the full cost of the infrastructure and electric-service costs” for the site, and Georgia Power said the company will cut its draw by up to a gigawatt when the grid comes under strain. Effingham County has granted a 50% property tax abatement running 15 years, according to the Effingham Herald.

How the campus will be powered has not been settled publicly. Neither OpenAI nor Georgia Power has said, and TechCrunch reported that neither answered its questions on the point. Regulatory filings give a partial answer. Georgia Power won approval from the state Public Service Commission in December to add 9,885 megawatts, of which the OpenAI contract accounts for roughly a third, and told regulators it expects the full tranche to be contracted by the end of 2026. Most of it is natural gas: about 5.8 gigawatts, which would more than double the utility’s existing gas fleet, with the rest coming from solar and grid-scale batteries.

How scarce is the compute behind the tools marketers use?

Friar has been describing the shortage in plain terms since the spring. Speaking on the All-In podcast in June, she said compute is a very scarce resource and that “there’s just not enough tokens available”, and said the constraint would run through 2026 and stay tight into 2027. In a separate interview with ARK Invest chief executive Cathie Wood, she said OpenAI is making hard trade-offs and declining work it cannot support, and that she spends a lot of her time hunting for last-minute capacity for this year.

That shortage reaches marketing teams as price and rationing rather than downtime. OpenAI listed GPT-5.6 from £0.75 per million tokens at launch, and Amazon, Uber and Walmart have each capped what staff can spend on AI tools after token-based billing outran internal budgets. On the same podcast, Friar pointed to the $2,000-a-month agentic tier and to earlier scepticism about $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro as evidence that buyers pay more for capability than the market expects, which is the argument of a company planning to charge more for a scarce resource rather than less.

Nothing in the Georgia announcement changes that before 2028. A gigawatt of AI compute costs roughly $50 billion fully loaded and takes about three years to bring online, Friar said on the same podcast, which puts the relief from decisions taken now at the far end of the decade rather than the current planning year.

How firm is the $750 billion figure?

The $750 billion is planning guidance reported by the Journal rather than a contracted commitment, and it has already moved once this year. It sits on top of deals OpenAI has signed elsewhere: roughly 6 gigawatts of capacity with Oracle, a $138 billion eight-year arrangement with Amazon Web Services, and $250 billion of incremental spending through Microsoft Azure. TechCrunch also reported that Stargate, the build OpenAI put at the centre of its infrastructure plans in 2025, appears to have stalled.

Whether the company can carry the bill is a live question inside it. The Journal reported in April that Friar had told colleagues she was concerned OpenAI might not be able to meet future computing contracts if revenue growth did not keep pace, and repeated the point in its July reporting. Against that, Friar disclosed in January that OpenAI’s 2025 revenue passed $20 billion, up from about $6 billion in 2024, while its compute grew from 0.2 gigawatts in 2023 to about 1.9 gigawatts in 2025. The company raised $122 billion privately in March.

OpenAI has not said when the first GPU at Project Camellia will be switched on. Georgia Power’s electricity is not scheduled to start flowing until 2028.