Micro Brief: OpenAI’s New Infrastructure Narrative

Why OpenAI Wants to Power the Grid.

OpenAI’s new letter to the WhiteHouse trying to reframe AI as an infrastructure economy. First, AI was a tool to make human work easier. Then, it became a force to reshape business efficiency. Now, it’s the cornerstone of the infrastructure economy itself.

The company calls electricity a “strategic asset” and urges the U.S. to build 100 gigawatts of new power capacity each year — nearly double today’s rate — to sustain AI growth. The letter goes far beyond electricity. It lays out a full economic blueprint: expanding U.S. manufacturing, modernizing regulations, building new data centers, and mobilizing the national workforce — all framed as essential steps for AI competitiveness.

It’s a proposal perfectly aligned with the administration’s America First and China competition priorities: reindustrialization, workforce expansion, and energy independence as the pillars of AI leadership.

But while it reads like a bold industrial strategy, it’s also strikingly one-dimensional: There’s no ment…