An AI bubble threatens Silicon Valley, and all of us

This article appears in the April 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here. The week of Donald Trump’s inauguration, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, stood tall next to the president as he made a dramatic announcement: the launch of Project Stargate, a $500 billion supercluster in the rolling plains of Texas that would run OpenAI’s massive artificial-intelligence models. Befitting its name, Stargate would dwarf most megaprojects in human history. Even the $100 billion that Altman promised would be deployed “immediately” would be much more expensive than the Manhattan Project ($30 billion in current dollars) and the COVID vaccine’s Operation Warp Speed ($18 billion), rivaling the multiyear construction of the Interstate Highway System ($114 billion). OpenAI would have all the computing infrastructure it needed to complete its ultimate goal of building humanity’s last invention: artificial general intelligence (AGI). Art for this story was created with Midjourney 6.1, ... Read full article.