OpenAI is poised to help develop a staggering 5-gigawatt data center campus in Abu Dhabi, positioning the company as a primary anchor tenant in what could become one of the world’s largest AI infrastructure projects, according to a new Bloomberg report.

The facility would reportedly span an astonishing 10 square miles and consume power equivalent to five nuclear reactors, dwarfing any existing AI infrastructure announced by OpenAI or its competitors. (OpenAI has not yet returned TechCrunch’s request for comment, but to put that into perspective, that’s bigger than Monaco.)

The UAE project, developed in partnership with G42 – an Abu Dhabi-based tech conglomerate – is part of OpenAI’s ambitious Stargate project, a joint venture announced in January that could see OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle build massive data centers around the globe stocked with powerful computer chips to support AI development.

While OpenAI’s first Stargate campus in the U.S. – already under development in Abilene, Texas – is expected to reach 1.2 gigawatts, this Middle Eastern counterpart would more than quadruple that capacity.

The project is emerging amid broader AI ties between the U.S. and UAE that have been years in the making, and have made some lawmakers nervous.

OpenAI’s relationship with the UAE dates back to a 2023 partnership with G42 aimed at driving AI adoption in the Middle East. During a talk earlier that same year in Abu Dhabi, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman praised the UAE, saying it “has been talking about AI since before it was cool.”

As with much of the AI world, these relationships are… complicated. Founded in 2018, G42 is chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security advisor and younger brother of the country’s ruler. Its embrace by OpenAI raised concerns in late 2023 among U.S. officials, who feared that G42 could enable China’s government to gain access to advanced U.S. technology.

These concerns focused on G42’s “active relationships” with blacklisted entities, including Huawei and Beijing Genomics Institute, as well as ties to individuals connected to China’s intelligence efforts.

Following pressure from U.S. lawmakers, G42’s CEO told Bloomberg in early 2024 that the company was shifting its strategy, saying: “All of our China investments that were previously made are already divested. Because of that, of course, we have no need anymore for any physical China presence.”

Soon after, Microsoft – a major shareholder in OpenAI with its own broader interests in the region – announced a $1.5 billion investment in G42, and its president, Brad Smith, joined G42’s board of directors.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman laid out a big vision for the future of ChatGPT at an AI event hosted by VC firm Sequoia earlier this month. 

When asked by one attendee about how ChatGPT can become more personalized, Altman replied that he eventually wants the model to document and remember everything in a person’s life.

The ideal, he said, is a “very tiny reasoning model with a trillion tokens of context that you put your whole life into.”

“This model can reason across your whole context and do it efficiently. And every conversation you’ve ever had in your life, every book you’ve ever read, every email you’ve ever read, everything you’ve ever looked at is in there, plus connected to all your data from other sources. And your life just keeps appending to the context,” he described.

“Your company just does the same thing for all your company’s data,” he added.

Altman may have some data-driven reason to think this is ChatGPT’s natural future. In that same discussion, when asked for cool ways young people use ChatGPT, he said, “People in college use it as an operating system.” They upload files, connect data sources, and then use “complex prompts” against that data.

Additionally, with ChatGPT’s memory options — which can use previous chats and memorized facts as context — he said one trend he’s noticed is that young people “don’t really make life decisions without asking ChatGPT.” 

“A gross oversimplification is: Older people use ChatGPT as, like, a Google replacement,” he said. “People in their 20s and 30s use it like a life advisor.”

It’s not much of a leap to see how ChatGPT could become an all-knowing AI system. Paired with the agents the Valley is currently trying to build, that’s an exciting future to think about. 

Imagine your AI automatically scheduling your car’s oil changes and reminding you; planning the travel necessary for an out-of-town wedding and ordering the gift from the registry; or preordering the next volume of the book series you’ve been reading for years.

But the scary part? How much should we trust a Big Tech for-profit company to know everything about our lives? These are companies that don’t always behave in model ways.

Google, which began life with the motto “don’t be evil” lost a lawsuit in the U.S. that accused it of engaging in anticompetitive, monopolistic behavior. 

Chatbots can be trained to respond in politically motivated ways. Not only have Chinese bots been found to comply with China’s censorship requirements but xAI’s chatbot Grok this week was randomly discussing a South African “white genocide” when people asked it completely unrelated questions. The behavior, many noted, implied intentional manipulation of its response engine at the command of its South African-born founder, Elon Musk.

Last month, ChatGPT became so agreeable it was downright sycophantic. Users began sharing screenshots of the bot applauding problematic, even dangerous decisions and ideas. Altman quickly responded by promising the team had fixed the tweak that caused the problem.

Even the best, most reliable models still just outright make stuff up from time to time. 

So, having an all-knowing AI assistant could help our lives in ways we can only begin to see. But given Big Tech’s long history of iffy behavior, that’s also a situation ripe for misuse.

Coders were hit hardest among Microsoft’s 2,000-person layoff in its home state of Washington, Bloomberg reports.

Over 40% of the people laid off were in software engineering, making it by far the largest category, Bloomberg found based on state filings. Relatively few sales or marketing positions were affected, Bloomberg added. 

To be fair, coders are a big chunk of Microsoft’s workforce, although it doesn’t disclose the exact proportion. The cuts are part of recent layoffs at Microsoft affecting about 6,000 people.

Still, these cuts come after CEO Satya Nadella said last month that up to 30% of the company’s code was now written by AI. 

TechCrunch asked Microsoft if the layoffs were motivated by the rise of AI-assisted coding. The tech giant declined to comment. Microsoft has said the layoffs are aimed at reducing management layers.