OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is aiming to build or buy a rocket company in a move which would pitch him into closer competition with Elon Musk.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Altman has already explored whether he may be able to acquire or partner with an existing rocket maker, with a view to installing power-hungry data centres in orbit around the Earth.
Altman approached at least one launch startup – Stoke Space – over the summer, with talks of working together intensifying in the fall, the report said.
Proposals included a multibillion‑dollar equity investment that could have led to giving OpenAI a controlling stake in the firm.
However, those discussions have since stalled, according to people close to the company.
Altman’s relationship with Musk has previously driven increased competition between the two tech moguls. Once they were colleagues, co-founding OpenAI in 2015. But after divisions over how to run the company and secure funding, Musk left in 2018.
OpenAI launched Chat GPT in 2022, making the company and Altman himself, a household name. A year later Musk accused OpenAI and Microsoft of monopolising the market in generative AI.
While the pair have traded barbs in public, the clash appeared to have spurred Musk to compete in the AI space, launching xAI and the chatbot Grok.
Despite being far behind Musk’s leading Space X company, Altman’s interest in developing space-based technology appears to be a long-held concern.
Annual demand for data centres is forecast to rise between 19 and 22 per cent by 2030, according to global management consultants McKinsey.
“Should I build a rocket company?” Altman asked on a podcast with his brother in June this year.
“I hope that eventually humanity is consuming way more energy than we could ever be generating on Earth,” he said.
This week Altman had concerns closer to home. He declared a “code red” situation at OpenAI due to concerns it wasn’t responding fast enough to increased competition from rivals such as Google Gemini.
Google released the latest version of its AI model last month, with Gemini 3 surpassing ChatGPT in a range of benchmark tests.
Google said Gemini now represented a “new era of intelligence” after it set a new record score on Humanity’s Last Exam – a test created by AI safety researchers to identify artificial superintelligence.
Altman congratulated Google shortly after its release, calling it a “great model” in a post to X.
But privately, he reportedly told employees that ChatGPT had fallen behind Google, writing, “We know we have some work to do, but we are catching up fast”.
