As the AI competition enters deeper waters, the "ticket price" for top AI vendors is rising at an astonishing speed. On May 5th local time, Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, revealed in a court testimony that the company expects its spending on computing resources to reach as much as $50 billion this year alone.

This figure not only highlights the extreme energy consumption of developing cutting-edge large models but also reveals the geometric growth of financial barriers in the AI industry in recent years. In his testimony, Brockman compared the cost expenditures throughout OpenAI's development: as early as 2017, the company's computing costs were about $30 million; however, with the development of more advanced models and the widespread service to hundreds of millions of users around the world, this cost has increased by thousands of times in just a few years.

For OpenAI, $50 billion may just be the beginning. According to informed sources, this AI giant has already set a more ambitious long-term budget goal - by 2030, its total computing expenditure is expected to reach about $600 billion. This means that in order to maintain its leading position in the field of general artificial intelligence (AGI), OpenAI must continuously maintain an extremely large cash flow and computing investment.

Currently, with the explosive growth of demand for AI chips, computing power has become the most scarce strategic resource in the technology industry. OpenAI's substantial investment is not only to support the development of the next generation of models with greater "generality," but also to cope with the rapid progress of competitors around the world. In the foreseeable future, competition in the AI field will no longer be just a battle of algorithms and code, but a "final bet" on capital endurance and computing scale.