OpenAI pledges $71 million for Georgia college students to use AI platform

“What we want to enable is for students to move beyond just chatting with ChatGPT to doing much deeper building, agentic, and coding work,” Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s vice president of education, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

ChatGPT has become a popular program for students nationwide. In fact, more than 40% of all ChatGPT users are students, according to Belsky. That existing familiarity with OpenAI’s most famous product, paired with the $100 Codex credit, could encourage more students to use the platform.

Using Codex, which was launched last year, would offer students more hands-on experience with artificial intelligence.

Belsky said in the past, creating a website or an app was something only engineers or designers could do. “Codex is democratizing the ability for anyone to build and create applications. And that’s why we want to get it into the hands of all students,” she said.

Although Codex is free for download and can be used at no cost, it does come with usage limits. Users can exceed those limits with credits. With the OpenAI investment, Georgia students who enroll in the program will find $100 worth of credits in their accounts.

“These credits allow them to take a project much further than they otherwise would with the free offering,” said Belsky.

OpenAI’s $71 million estimate should be more than enough to grant $100 for every college student in the state. Enrollment at Georgia’s public universities, technical colleges and its largest private universities totals less than 600,000 students.

The company said the $71 million figure reflects the potential value of the offer; any value that goes unclaimed will not be paid out or redirected.

OpenAI has also offered the Codex credits in Michigan. In Georgia, the offer does not currently have a deadline for enrollment.

“Our hope is that as many students as possible will signup, that we’ll be able to work with local institutions to also make sure that more students in the state realize that this offer is available. And we’ll go from there,” said Belsky.

OpenAI noted in a blog post about the program that Georgia is “one of the fastest-growing centers for manufacturing, logistics, technology, healthcare, and innovation in the country.”

“As AI becomes a tool used across more industries, students need opportunities to develop the skills that will help them succeed in the workforce.”

In a separate blog post, OpenAI said the Codex credits were one piece of how the community would benefit from the controversial Savannah area project. It will also dole out $80 million in “community benefits” over the life of the project, directing the money toward local priorities such as schools, public safety, healthcare and utilities. The post also said that electricity rates for residents will not increase, that the center’s water use will be “minimal” and that it will become the largest taxpayer in the county (even with a 50% property tax abatement for 15 years).

Even so, the project is receiving significant pushback from locals who have called the proposal’s rollout secretive and manipulative.

The four-building, 4.4-million-square-foot facility could open as early as 2028, and it’s certainly not the only pending project in the state. On the same day OpenAI filed key state paperwork for its data center, so did two other project proposals: in Clayton County, a $13 billion data center project called Stillwater Technology Park, while Google proposed a $1 billion expansion to its existing computing campus in LaGrange.