Articles: Costs

Costs

Stargate, Spud and subscriptions: the compute lever behind OpenAI's comeback

10 gigawatts 'secured years ahead of schedule', 0.3 gigawatt plugged in at Abilene. Behind OpenAI's comeback in AI coding, a compute bet that must be read in three states: the secured, the built, the plugged-in. And a subscription economics that agents cracked open.

18 min read
  • Stargate
  • OpenAI
  • Compute
  • Datacenter

Costs

GPT-5.6 and the Codex merger: anatomy of OpenAI's comeback

On July 8, 2026, OpenAI disavowed the reference benchmark for agentic coding. On the 9th, it merged Codex into the ChatGPT app and launched GPT-5.6. Behind the sequence, a comeback that turns less on intelligence than on prices, subscriptions and the harness.

19 min read
  • GPT-5.6
  • Codex
  • Claude Code
  • OpenAI