Six thousand workers arrive daily at an OpenAI construction site in West Texas. That’s more people than the company employs worldwide. Dust blankets the area. Rain turns the roads to mud, then the sun bakes them hard again.

Sam Altman stood there in September watching it all. “This is what it takes to deliver AI,” Altman told CNBC on site in September. “Unlike previous technological revolutions or previous versions of the internet, there’s so much infrastructure that’s required. And this is a small sample of it.”

Each site costs around $50 billion. OpenAI’s Stargate program totals near $850 billion across all locations.

The Abilene campus has one data center running already. Another’s almost done. CFO Sarah Friar said it could eventually push past one gigawatt of capacity, enough electricity for about 750,000 homes.

“The shovels that are going in the ground here today, they’re really about compute that comes online in 2026,” she said in September. “That first Nvidia push will be for Vera Rubins, the new frontier accelerator chips. But then it’s about what gets built for ’27, ’28, and ’29. What we see today is a massive compute crunch.”

Altman didn’t hide the company’s hunger for more. “We are growing faster than any business I’ve ever heard of before,” Altman said, squinting against the sun. “And we would be way bigger now if we had way more capacity.”

OpenAI is not the only one building

Mark Zuckerberg’s putting up Hyperion in Louisiana. Four million square feet. Uses more power than New Orleans.

Google is breaking ground in Arkansas on what state officials call the largest private investment in their history. Elon Musk built his Colossus supercomputer in Memphis in just 122 days. Now he’s expanding with Colossus 2, shooting for one million GPUs.

Microsoft is dropping over $7 billion in Wisconsin. Satya Nadella says it’ll be the world’s most powerful AI data center.

Sameer Dholakia from Bessemer Venture Partners put it bluntly. “This is the largest market in the history of mankind,” said Sameer Dholakia, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “This is larger than oil, because everyone on the planet needs intelligence.”

The numbers are hard to wrap your head around. Five major companies are headed toward approximately $443 billion in capital spending this year. CreditSights thinks that it will hit $602 billion in 2026, up 36% year-over-year.

Not all these companies have that kind of cash sitting around.

They’re borrowing. Heavy. $121 billion in new debt this year, more than four times what they averaged over the previous five years. Meta tapped the bond market for $30 billion. Alphabet raised $25 billion. Oracle just closed an $18 billion bond sale.

Wall Street expects the borrowing to keep climbing. Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan estimate AI infrastructure could drive up to $1.5 trillion in additional tech company borrowing. UBS analysts are forecasting as much as $900 billion in new debt issuance coming in 2026 alone.

“There is something inherently uncomfortable as a credit investor about the transformation of the sort we’re facing that is going to require an enormous amount of capital,” Daniel Sorid, head of U.S. investment grade credit strategy at Citi, told investors on a video call earlier this month.

Investors are getting nervous

Credit-default swaps for Oracle are at multi-year highs. A liquid market for Meta protection started trading in late October for the first time.

OpenAI sits right in the middle of all this. This fall, they announced partnerships adding up to roughly $1.4 trillion in headline commitments. In two months.

September: $100 billion deal with Nvidia. October: agreements with AMD and Broadcom for chip supplies. November: first cloud contract with Amazon Web Services.

“We have to do this,” OpenAI President Greg Brockman told CNBC in October, referring to the company’s scramble to secure the raw computing power behind its ambitions. “This is so core to our mission if we really want to be able to scale to reach all of humanity, this is what we have to do.”

Some analysts aren’t buying it. Gil Luria at D.A. Davidson points to Oracle as a test case. “OpenAI made commitments that it’s highly unlikely they’ll be able to live up to,” he said. “Now they’re backtracking and saying these aren’t really commitments — these are frameworks.”

Oracle’s stock dropped 23% in November. Worst month since 2001.

Sarah Friar pushed back on the criticism during her interview in West Texas. She compared it to the early web. People thought there was too much infrastructure then too. OpenAI’s looking at debt financing for the first time. They’ve reviewed over 800 potential sites across North America.

Power’s the real problem, she said. “The real bottleneck isn’t money,” she said. “It’s power.”

Late December brought another big move. SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son bought DigitalBridge for $4 billion. To get the cash and fund his $40 billion commitment to OpenAI, he sold his entire Nvidia stake. He told a forum in Tokyo afterward that he “was crying” over having to sell those shares.

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