Sam Altman Warns AI Will Be Deflationary, But Says OpenAI's Biggest Constraint Isn't Data Or Demand, It's GPUs

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke candidly at a private Morgan Stanley event, revealing what he believes investors are still underestimating about artificial intelligence.

What Happened: At a closed-door tech conference hosted by Morgan Stanley last week, Altman shared several insights into the future of AI — and the growing challenges his company faces, reported Business Insider.

Altman told attendees that AI will likely have a deflationary impact on the global economy — a consequence he believes is underappreciated and misunderstood by investors, according to a summary of the event released Monday by Morgan Stanley analysts.

The analysts noted that this aligns with their projections, writing that increased productivity from AI "would help offset inflation" and drive global efficiency.

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Despite AI's deflationary potential, OpenAI's growth is constrained not by demand or data — but by access to GPUs, the high-performance chips needed to train and operate large language models.

The company reportedly said its GPU fleet is "completely saturated" and that it has never experienced a situation "where it can't sell out access to its GPUs at reasonable margins."

While compute remains a challenge, concerns about training data were dismissed. "Data is not a constraint in the way that compute is," the analysts wrote.

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Why It's Important: Altman's remarks come at a critical time for OpenAI, which earlier this week signed an $11.9 billion deal with CoreWeave and acquired a $350 million equity stake in the cloud provider, a move that reduces its reliance on Microsoft Corporation MSFT for compute power.

The company is also reportedly moving forward with developing its own custom AI chips, signaling long-term efforts to address compute constraints and scale more independently.

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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of Benzinga Neuro and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.

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