OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has sought so much computing power to train the company’s AI models that, according to one report, Japanese officials actually laughed at the amount of electricity he demanded. It’s not laughable anymore after Altman secured a staggering $500 billion commitment from SoftBank, Oracle, and the Abu Dhabi fund MGX. @theverge has more, including why Stargate, OpenAI’s data center empire, could be one of the biggest private computing infrastructure projects in history — or a disaster.