A recent letter from OpenAI reveals more details about how the company hopes the federal government can support the company’s ambitious data center construction plans.
The letter — from OpenAI’s head of global affairs Chris Lehane and addressed to White House director of science and technology policy Michael Kratsios — argued that the government should consider expanding the Advanced Manufacturing Investment Credit (AMIC) beyond semiconductor manufacturing to cover electrical grid components, AI servers and AI data centers.
The AMIC is a 35% tax credit that was included in the Biden administration’s Chips Act.
“Expanding coverage of AMIC will lower the effective cost of capital, reduce the risk of early investment, and unlock private capital to help alleviate bottlenecks and accelerate AI deployment in the United States,” Lehane wrote.
OpenAI’s letter also urged the government to speed up the approval and environmental assessment process for these projects and create a strategic reserve of raw materials — such as copper, aluminum and processed rare earth minerals — needed to build AI infrastructure.
The company first published its letter on Oct. 27, but it didn’t get much press attention until this week, when comments from OpenAI executives prompted broader discussion about what the company wants from the Trump administration.
At a Wall Street Journal event Wednesday, CFO Sarah Friar said the government should “backstop” OpenAI’s infrastructure loans, though she later wrote on LinkedIn that she misspoke: “OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop for our infrastructure obligations. I used the word ‘backstop’ and it confused the point.”
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CEO Sam Altman also weighed in, writing that OpenAI does not “have or want government guarantees for OpenAI data centers.”
“We believe that governments should not pick winners or losers and that taxpayers should not bail out companies that make bad business decisions or otherwise lose in the marketplace,” he wrote, though he said the company had discussed loan guarantees “as part of supporting the construction of semiconductor factories in the United States.”
In the same post, Altman wrote that the company expects to end 2025 “over $20 billion in annual revenue and grow to hundreds of billions by 2030,” and he said OpenAI has made $1.4 trillion in capital commitments for the next eight years.