OpenAI has asked the Trump administration to expand the CHIP Act’s tax break to include data centers

A recent letter from OpenAI reveals more details about how the company hopes the federal government can support the company’s ambitious plans to build data centers.

The letter — from OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane and addressed to White House Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios — argued that the government should consider expanding the Advanced Manufacturing Investment Credit (AMIC) beyond semiconductor manufacturing to cover electrical grid components, AI servers, and AI data centers.

AMIC is a 35% tax credit that was included in the Biden administration’s chip law.

“Expanding AMIC coverage will lower the effective cost of capital, de-risk early investment, and unleash private capital to help ease bottlenecks and accelerate the buildout of AI in the United States,” Lehane wrote.

The OpenAI letter also called on the government to speed up the permitting and environmental review process for these projects, and to create a strategic reserve of raw materials — such as copper, aluminum and processed rare earth metals — needed to build AI infrastructure.

The company first posted its letter on October 27, but it received little press attention until this week, when comments from OpenAI executives sparked a broader discussion about what the company wants from the Trump administration.

At a Wall Street Journal event on Wednesday, CFO Sarah Friar said the government should “backstop” OpenAI’s infrastructure loans, though she later posted on LinkedIn that she got it wrong: “OpenAI is not seeking government support for our infrastructure commitments. I used the word ‘backstop’ and it distorts the point.”

CEO Sam Altman weighed in as well, writing that OpenAI “does not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI’s data centers.”

“We believe that governments should not pick winners or losers, and that taxpayers should not bail out companies that make poor business decisions or lose in the market,” he wrote, though he said the company discussed loan guarantees “as part of supporting the construction of semiconductor factories in the United States.”

In the same post, Altman wrote that the company expects to end 2025 “over $20 billion in annual revenue run rate and grow into the hundreds of billions by 2030,” and said OpenAI has made $1.4 trillion in capital commitments for the next eight years.