Senator emphasizes Utah as a destination for AI infrastructure to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
During a Senate Commerce Committee hearing today on removing regulatory barriers in the AI supply chain, U.S. Senator John Curtis (R-UT) underscored Utah’s readiness to lead the next generation of artificial intelligence infrastructure while advocating for balanced energy policy and AI accessibility for small businesses. In an exchange with OpenAI Co-Founder and CEO Sam Altman and Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith, Curtis raised concerns about protecting ratepayers amid rising energy demands, and emphasized the practical ways AI models—like ChatGPT—are supporting small business owners.
A transcript of the exchange can be found below, and the video file can be downloaded here.
Senator Curtis: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It’s a delight to be here. Mr. Altman, you started kind of a one-upmanship on computers, and I will just tell you in 1985, the month you were born, I was attending a class at Brigham Young University and carried in a laptop and was almost kicked out.
Mr. Sam Altman: What laptop?
Curtis: It was a TRS-80, made by RadioShack. I upgraded the memory from 40 K to 80 K. It ran on four AA batteries. So, I’m very envious of your generation.
Let me start with you, if I could. I think you know Utah would aspire to lead out with data centers and advanced technologies. Could you just address for states, and Utah specifically, what it is that makes them attractive to projects like Stargate?
Altman: Yeah. And I know that we’re having productive discussions about some potential sites in Utah. Power, cooling, fast permitting process, labor force that can build these things–the electricians, the construction workers, the entire stack. A state that wants to, like, partner with us to move quickly. Texas really has been unbelievable on this. I think that would be a good thing for other states to study, but we’d be excited to try to figure something out.
Curtis: Thank you. I think I could speak for our state leaders, we would be excited as well.
But as you know, this also brings challenges. And one of those challenges are the demands for energy. What are your thoughts on how we protect ratepayers and kind of put a little bit of a firewall between them?
Altman: I mean, I think the best way is just much more supply, more generation. You know, like, I think if you make it easy to reasonably, profitably create a lot of additional generative capacity, the market will do that. That will not only not drive up rates because of the AI workload, hopefully it’ll drive down for everything.
And we’ve talked a lot about the importance of energy to AI. Energy is just really important to quality of life. One of the things that seems to be the most consistent throughout history is every time the cost of energy falls, the quality of life goes up. And so, doing a lot to make energy cheaper.
In the short term, I think this probably looks like more natural gas. Although there are some applications where I think solar can really help. In the medium term, I hope it’s advanced nuclear fission and fusion.
More energy is important well beyond AI. You know, in some sense we have these dual revolutions going of AI and energy, the ability to have new ideas, and the ability to get them done, to make them happen in the physical world where we all live. These are kind of the limiting reagents of prosperity. And let’s have a lot more.
Curtis: Thank you. Mr. Smith, we’ve talked about how significant power was, is, to the success here. What role do you think Microsoft and other tech leaders have in developing energy and particularly, the right type of energy?
Mr. Brad Smith: I think we have a tremendous responsibility to contribute to the solution. And I think Sam helped with his list. I would highlight two things, and I just would, I guess, illustrate it, with what we do everywhere. But most recently, with a major site in southeastern Wisconsin. You know, we went from zero, basically, to becoming the largest industrial user of electricity in the state. Roughly 400MW.
And, you know, so we worked with the local utility. We made the investment to help and really enable them to expand their electricity generation. Now, that electricity then needed to be delivered from their power plant through the grid to our data center. We went to the Public Utilities Commission, and we proposed a rate increase on ourselves because we thought it was important that we pay for that improvement to the grid so that the neighbors, so to speak, would not have to.
And I think what it really illustrates is the collaborative partnerships that are needed to provide the capital, to do the construction, to improve the grid, and to be, I think, very sensitive to the community as a whole.
Curtis: Thank you. Mr. Altman, let me come back to you. I was a small business owner. I have a special spot in my heart for small business owners. Can we talk a little bit about ChatGPT and how that might assist small business owners?
And let me paint a little broader picture. We’ve heard a lot about other tools that are perhaps out of favor, particularly with the U.S. government, that they’re very helpful for small businesses. But I don’t know if small businesses are fully understanding the platform that you have and how they might use it for marketing, for data research, and ways to help their small business be successful.
Altman: There were all these moments, as ChatGPT was beginning to take off, where we would be like, ‘Oh, we may have, like, a hit on our hands, that someone’s using it for this and this and strangers talking about it, you see someone use it in a coffee shop.’
But one of the ones that really sticks out for me is, pretty quickly after ChatGPT launched, like in the first six months, say, I was in an Uber, and the driver was making conversation and he’s like, ‘Have you heard of this thing called ChatGPT? It’s amazing.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, well, like, what do you think about it?’ And he was using it to run basically his entire small business. He was like, he ran a laundromat, and he’s like, ‘I had all these problems, you know, like, couldn’t find good people to write my ads, couldn’t get, like, legal documents reviewed, couldn’t, like, answer customer support emails.’ And he was, like, a mega early adopter, but he was one of these people that was using AI to, like, make a small business work.
We talked about that story a lot at the time. But it’s nice to reflect on it again now.
We’ve now heard that at scale from a lot of people, but that was one of those moments early on, where we were like, ‘Oh, this is maybe going to work.’
Curtis: So, and I’m out of time, but just to mark, this is more than just something that helps proofread emails, right? And you don’t need to comment because I’m out of time, but I think we would all agree with that. And I look forward to seeing these applications move forward.
Mr. Chairman, I yield my time.