IBL News | New York
In a 60-minute interview, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, addressed growing concerns about AI risks, safety, regulation, AGI, and the future of humanity. He said that AGI is closer than we think. “It feels pretty close at this point. Given what I know to be a faster takeoff, I expect superintelligence is not that far off.”
Speaking as a guest at Express Adda held on February 20, on the sidelines of the India-AI Impact Summit 2026, and in response to a question about the amount of water going into data centres housing GPU server racks that power AI models, Altman suggested that such concerns were “totally fake” because “we used to do evaporative cooling in data centres.”
However, he acknowledged that it was fair to be concerned about “the energy consumption — not per query, but in total, because the world is now using so much AI, which is real, and we need to move towards nuclear or wind and solar [energy] very quickly.”
The CEO of OpenAI rejected the concept of space-based data centres. “Putting data centres in space with the current landscape is ridiculous. Orbital data centres are not going to matter at scale this decade due to the rough math of launch costs and how hard it is to fix a broken GPU in space,” Altman said.
SpaceX, owned by Altman’s archrival Elon Musk, wants to show that outer space can be a hospitable environment for data centres compared to enormous multi-gigawatt terrestrial facilities that consume millions of gallons of water daily and produce substantial greenhouse gas emissions.