- OpenAI’s ‘guaranteed capacity’ allows large enterprises to benefit from up to three years of guaranteed computing
- In return, OpenAI gets predictable revenue to fund continued data center expansion
- Stargate has also introduced a new closed-loop water cooling system, in a big step forward in sustainability.
ChatGPT maker OpenAI has announced a new “guaranteed capacity” plan for businesses that want to lock down and reserve long-term access to company IT infrastructure.
This strategic shift comes as AI companies face increased pressure from growing business adoption of AI, which can lead to occasional downtime.
OpenAI recently revealed that around 40% of its $2 billion in monthly revenue comes from enterprise customers – a number that is expected to continue to grow.
Guaranteed capacity
The company recently revealed that it has 900 million weekly ChatGPT users, but earlier WSJ reports indicated that OpenAI failed to meet internal targets in 2025, including the number of users.
That article also revealed potential tensions between CDO Sarah Friar, who advocates financial discipline, and CEO Sam Altman, who takes a buy-it-all approach.
The Guaranteed Capacity program is designed specifically for large-scale applications and agentic automation that require continuous, uninterrupted computing, rather than for small businesses that want to avoid occasional outages.
Eligible businesses can request over 1 billion tokens per minute in capacity, and pricing is directly tied to annual spending levels for one, two, and three-year plans.
“Customers can benefit from this commitment across the entire OpenAI product portfolio,” the company said.
The company’s CEO, Sam Altman, said in an article that the update responds to customer feedback and would be available “until we sell our current allocation for this program.”
We will “significantly increase our computing capacity,” says OpenAI
Altman also admitted that predictable revenue from large enterprise contracts and guaranteed capacity applicants would help the company plan, giving it access to more consistent liquidity to build future data centers.
“Our intention remains to create as many calculations as possible,” Altman added.
OpenAI’s flagship title is the Stargate project, which has attracted collaboration from Microsoft, Oracle and others. When it was first announced in January 2025, the company targeted 10 GW of AI infrastructure in the United States by 2029 – a figure it reached just over a year later. In April, the company reported that it had also recently acquired an additional 3 GW of capacity.
With plans to “dramatically expand [its] computing capacity in the coming years,” OpenAI and its partners are already looking for future sites across the United States, also noting the progress data centers are making in terms of sustainability.
Each building at its flagship campus in Abilene, Texas, requires the equivalent of two Olympic-sized swimming pools of water, but instead of traditional evaporative cooling towers, it uses a closed-loop system where water recirculates through sealed pipes.
“The annual water consumption for the entire cooling system, once fully operational, is expected to be comparable to that of an average-sized office building, or approximately four average households,” the company said.
By providing businesses with a way to secure up to three years of dedicated compute, OpenAI ultimately builds in revenue predictability to support the continued buildout of its data centers and further improve efficiency.
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