A recent letter from OpenAI provides further details about how the company hopes the federal government can support its ambitious plans to build data centers.
The letter, from Chris Lehane, chief global affairs officer at OpenAI, to Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, argues that the government should consider expanding the Advanced Manufacturing Investment Credit (AMIC) beyond semiconductor manufacturing to include power grid components, AI servers, and AI data centers.
AMIC is a 35% tax credit included in the Biden administration’s tipping law.
“Expanding the scope of AMIC will lower the effective cost of capital, reduce initial investment risk, reduce bottlenecks, and leverage private capital to accelerate the buildout of AI in the United States,” Lehane wrote.
OpenAI’s letter also called on governments to accelerate the permitting and environmental review process for these projects and to create a strategic stockpile of raw materials (such as copper, aluminum, and processed rare earth minerals) needed to build AI infrastructure.
The company first released the letter on Oct. 27, but it didn’t receive much media attention until this week, when comments from OpenAI executives sparked broader discussion about what the company wanted from the Trump administration.
At a Wall Street Journal event on Wednesday, Chief Financial Officer Sarah Fryer said the government should “backstop” OpenAI’s infrastructure financing, but later posted on LinkedIn that “OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop for infrastructure. I used the word ‘backstop’ and missed the point.”
tech crunch event
san francisco
|
October 13-15, 2026
CEO Sam Altman echoed this sentiment, writing that OpenAI “does not have and does not desire government guarantees for OpenAI data centers.”
He said the company had discussed loan guarantees “as part of our support for building semiconductor factories in the United States,” but wrote that he “believes that the government should not choose winners and losers, and that taxpayers should not bail out companies that make poor business decisions or lose money in the marketplace.”
In the same post, Altman wrote that the company expects to have an “annual revenue run rate of over $20 billion by the end of 2025, growing to hundreds of billions of dollars by 2030,” and said OpenAI has committed $1.4 trillion in capital over the next eight years.
