This article first appeared on GuruFocus.
Sam Altman has been moving with the urgency of someone who sees the AI curve bending faster than the market expected. In the summer, he reached out to Stoke Spacean up-and-coming rocket maker founded by former Blue Origin talentto explore a partnership that could eventually give OpenAI a controlling stake. People familiar with the talks said the proposal involved a series of equity investments that could total billions of dollars over time. The discussions intensified in the fall before falling dormant, but the timing matters: they unfolded just as OpenAI committed hundreds of billions of dollars in new computing deals while offering no public roadmap for how the company intends to finance that expansion. At the same time, Altman has been floating the idea that AI demand could grow so heavy that humanity may one day push compute infrastructure into orbit, tapping the sun directly to power it.
That urgency sharpened this week when OpenAI declared a companywide code red to refocus on ChatGPT after the product began losing share to Google’s Gemini. Rollouts of new initiatives, including advertising, are now being pushed back, and teams are being encouraged to shift temporarily toward strengthening the chatbot. For Altman, space has long been part of the thought experiment around scaling AI safely, and he has pointed to concepts like orbital data centers as a possible answer to long-term environmental and energy constraints. The idea remains untested, though Google and Planet Labs plan to launch two prototype satellites carrying Google AI chips in 2027. Stoke’s ambitiona fully reusable rocket called Novawould have offered a potential entry point at a moment when multiple launch companies are vying to challenge SpaceX, which sits at the center of both the commercial-launch and AI-compute narratives through Musk’s xAI.
Market sentiment has shifted since Altman’s burst of chip and data-center announcements in September and October with Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) and others. Shares of Oracle have dropped about 19% over the past month, Nvidia is down roughly 13%, and Nvidia’s CFO said this week the company’s $100 billion agreement with OpenAI is still not finalized. OpenAI has taken on almost $600 billion in new computing commitments in recent months while expecting $13 billion in revenue this year, a mismatch that investors are watching closely as rivals such as Anthropic gain momentum among coders and enterprises. Altman, who previously committed $18 billion of OpenAI’s capital to the data-center venture Stargate and runs an extensive portfolio built over years as a venture investor, has also launched efforts that increasingly overlap with Muskfrom Merge Labs to a new social-network project. The Stoke talks may have ended, but they highlight a broader reality: Altman is positioning OpenAI for a future where compute, capital, and aerospace could be intertwined, and where the race to power the next wave of AI may extend far beyond Earth itself.