Sam Altman appeared at BlackRock's U.S. Infrastructure Summit on March 12 alongside Adebayo Ogunlesi — a BlackRock infrastructure executive who also sits on OpenAI's board — and pushed a deceptively simple idea: artificial intelligence should be sold like electricity or water, with consumers buying intelligence directly from OpenAI by the unit. He reached for the nuclear industry's old 'too cheap to meter' line to frame where AI abundance is headed, which reads either as a vision statement or a cautionary tale about unfulfilled promises, depending on your read of history.
The venue was worth noting. Ogunlesi's dual role as BlackRock infrastructure figure and OpenAI board member made the conversation less a public address than a pitch between partners with aligned interests in getting large infrastructure financed.
That pitch is under real strain. OpenAI recently scaled back its planned Texas expansion of the Stargate data center project after running into financing difficulties, and residents near existing AI data centers have seen sharply higher electricity bills as power demand spikes. Reaching for energy analogies while presiding over one of the most power-hungry buildouts in internet history was a rhetorical gamble; critics flagged the irony quickly.
There is also the matter of what 'utility' implies beyond the metaphor. Traditional utilities are subsidized, regulated, and backstopped by governments precisely because they are treated as essential services. Altman and CFO Sarah Friar made that logic explicit earlier this year — Friar called for a federal backstop to guarantee OpenAI's data center financing, and Altman separately described the federal government as the 'insurer of last resort' for AI infrastructure. Both later walked those remarks back. Reframing AI as a public utility without spelling out what that means for public support is a deliberate omission.
For the agent ecosystem, the financing struggle is not an abstraction. Reasoning models, multi-step orchestration frameworks, and the compute pipelines that run autonomous agents at scale all depend on the data center capacity OpenAI has not yet built. If intelligence stays scarce and expensive, the architectures that survive will be the ones only well-capitalized enterprises can afford. Altman's abundance vision is real enough as a goal. The bill is arriving before the abundance.