WSJ: The head of OpenAI wanted to create a SpaceX competitor. Why did he refuse?

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was considering an acquisition or partnership with rocket company Stoke Space to create a competitor to Elon Musk's SpaceX, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported, citing sources close to OpenAI. In the renewed company, Altman, according to them, hoped to get a controlling stake through a multibillion-dollar equity investment.

However, all negotiations have now been terminated, the newspaper's interlocutors said.

According to WSJ sources, Altman was in contact with at least one rocket manufacturer, Stoke Space, over the summer. In the fall, those talks became more active. Among the options discussed was a series of investments that would allow OpenAI to gain a controlling stake in Stoke Space over the horizon of several years. The volume of such investments would eventually amount to billions of dollars, the publication writes.

The proposed partnership with Stoke would increase direct competition between Altman and Elon Musk, given SpaceX's dominance of the rocket launch market and Musk's rival AI startup xAI, the WSJ notes.

Additional tension may have been created by the fact that Altman recently launched Merge Labs, a brain-computer interface company that competes with Musk's Neuralink. In addition, OpenAI is working in parallel on its own social network, which could become a competitor to X, the newspaper said.

In addition, Altman, as the WSJ points out, has been interested for some time in the possibility of building data centers in space. According to the businessman, the publication continues, the insatiable demand for computing resources for AI systems could eventually require so much energy that "the environmental consequences would make space a preferable option." Proponents argue that orbiting data centers would allow companies to harness the sun's energy for their operations.

However, all negotiations regarding the OpenAI and Stoke Space deal have now been terminated, the publication's sources said. The reasons for this are not given.

Altman and OpenAI have run into trouble after closing $600 billion in computing deals without providing a public and clear plan for how the startup is going to fund infrastructure scaling, the WSJ writes.

On December 1, OpenAI announced an urgent need to accelerate improvements to ChatGPT after the service began losing market share to Google's Gemini chatbot. Because of this, the company is postponing the launch of other products, including advertising tools, and is asking employees to temporarily move to teams involved in chatbot development, the publication reported.

Talks about a potential investment in the rocket company began to take shape at a time when market interest in artificial intelligence was at its peak, the WSJ notes. In September and October, Altman announced a series of chip and data center deals with companies such as Oracle, Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and others.

However, Nvidia's CFO said this week that the company's $100 billion deal with OpenAI has not yet been finalized.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor