Sam Altman has explored deal to build competitor to Elon Musk’s SpaceX

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman has explored putting together funds to either acquire or partner with a rocket company, a move that would position him to compete against Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Altman reached out to at least one rocket maker, Stoke Space, in the summer, and the discussions picked up in the fall, according to people familiar with the talks.

Among the proposals was for OpenAI to make a series of equity investments in the company and end up with a controlling stake. Such an investment would total billions of dollars over time. The talks are no longer active, people close to OpenAI said.

Altman and OpenAI are facing market headwinds after striking hundreds of billions of dollars in computing deals without publicly offering a clear picture of how the startup will pay for the build-out. OpenAI on Monday declared a “code red" to improve ChatGPT after it began losing market share to Google’s Gemini chatbot. As a result, OpenAI is delaying the rollout of other products, including advertising, and encouraging employees to temporarily transfer teams to work on the chatbot.

Altman has been interested in the possibility of building data centers in space for some time, suggesting that the insatiable demand for computing resources to power artificial-intelligence systems eventually could require so much power that the environmental consequences would make space a better option. Orbital data centers would allow companies to harness the power of the sun to operate them, advocates say. Founded by former employees at Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, Stoke is working on building a fully reusable rocket, something SpaceX is also attempting to pull off.