Sam Altman: AI Will Be Sold Like Electricity and Water, Metered by Usage

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says AI will eventually be sold as a metered utility like electricity or water, delivered on demand by companies like OpenAI.

Speaking at the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit in Washington, DC, Altman said tech companies are building toward a future where intelligence is delivered as a utility. "Fundamentally our business and I think the business of every other model provider is going to look like selling tokens," Altman said, referring to the units AI systems use to process and price input and output data. "We see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water and people buy it from us on a meter and use it for whatever they want to use it for."

The OpenAI CEO warned that compute capacity determines who gets access—and demand is surging. If OpenAI doesn't build enough capacity to meet demand, "either we can't sell it or the price gets really high," Altman said. That would push AI access toward the wealthy, or force governments to decide how limited compute should be distributed.

Major tech companies are set to spend hundreds of billions of dollars this year on compute to meet soaring demand. AMD CEO Lisa Su said at CES 2026 that the world will need more than 10 yottaflops of compute over the next five years—10,000 times larger than global AI capacity in 2022.

The challenge: AI data centers can consume as much electricity as small cities, and power grid constraints could become a bottleneck.