At a White House meeting, OpenAI's Sam Altman shared a company report on the benefits of building a data center of up to 5GW.

Such a facility would be equivalent to the consumption of nearly three million homes.

Altman and other tech leaders - including Nvidia's Jensen Huang, QTS' Chad Williams, and CoreWeave's Michael Intrator - visited the White House earlier this month to discuss the power needs of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers.

At the time, the Biden Administration said that it would set up a 'Task Force on AI Datacenter Infrastructure' and improve facilities' permitting.

During the meeting, Bloomberg reports that OpenAI CEO Altman shared a document with government officials outlining the economic and national security benefits of building 5GW data centers in several US states.

Update: A source familiar with OpenAI's plans disputed the narrative to DCD, saying that Altman's document was regarding one potential facility, but looked at the impacts on different states - Wisconsin, California, Texas, and Pennsylvania.

The OpenAI report itself built on a Goldman Sachs study which said that 47GW of incremental power generation capacity will be required to support US data center power demand growth cumulatively through 2030.

“OpenAI is actively working to strengthen AI infrastructure in the US, which we believe is critical to keeping America at the forefront of global innovation, boosting reindustrialization across the country, and making AI’s benefits accessible to everyone,” a spokesperson for OpenAI told DCD.

Joe Dominguez, CEO of Constellation Energy Corp., told Bloomberg that he has heard Altman talking about building five to seven data centers of that magnitude, after starting with one.

A source familiar with the matter called the 5GW figure "illustrative of the level of scale we and many believe is needed," but noted that it was not definitive.

Back in March, rumors swirled that Microsoft was considering spending $100 billion on a 'Stargate' 5GW data center for OpenAI. Altman also sought as much as $5-7 trillion for a wider effort to fund chip manufacturing, data centers, and energy infrastructure.

This month, Microsoft backed a $30bn BlackRock fund focused on data centers and energy projects.

Last week, Microsoft announced that it would work with Constellation to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant and consume all of its 837MW output.

Whether it is possible to find one, let alone multiple, sites for 5GW data centers in the US is an unknown question. The capacity would total that of Microsoft Azure's entire current global footprint.

Earlier this month, DigitalBridge-owned Scala Data Centers pitched moving such workloads to Brazil, where the company says it could build a 4.75GW campus - albeit, starting with a smaller deployment.

Alongside OpenAI and Microsoft, rivals Google, Amazon Web Services, Oracle, and Meta have publicly discussed 1GW+ data centers.

This article and headline has been updated to reflect further details about the White House meeting.