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Stargate, a high-profile artificial intelligence infrastructure will exclusively serve ChatGPT maker OpenAI, according to people familiar with the matter.
The venture planned to spend $100bn on Big Tech infrastructure projects, with the figure rising to as much as $500bn over the next four years, OpenAI and SoftBank, Stargate’s two main backers, said on Tuesday. Oracle and Abu Dhabi state AI fund MGX are also founding partners.
The SoftBank-backed initiative at a event attended by OpenAI chief Sam Altman and other tech executives was a resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential.
“The intent is not to become a data centre provider for the world, it’s for OpenAI,” said one of the people.
SoftBank and OpenAI intend to put forward more than $15bn each for the project. The companies hope to raise a combination of equity from their existing backers and debt, which will be used to fund Stargate. Tokyo-based SoftBank will also inject existing funds into Stargate, according to one of the people.
OpenAI and SoftBank declined to comment.
Altman has spent well over a year working on boosting OpenAI’s access to data and computing power, a bottleneck he argues must be overcome if the company is to achieve its goal of creating AI capable of surpassing humans across most cognitive skills, supplanting them in the workforce and pushing the boundaries of scientific research.
That has meant looking beyond OpenAI’s exclusive relationship with Microsoft. The group, which has invested $13bn into OpenAI and is entitled to almost half the profits from the start-up’s for-profit subsidiary, is providing technological support to Stargate, but not capital.
Microsoft launched its own $30bn AI infrastructure fund with fund manager BlackRock in September last year, and on Wednesday chief executive Satya Nadella said his company would spend $80bn on infrastructure this year, separate from Stargate.
Altman had been speaking to SoftBank chair Masayoshi Son for as long as two years about AI projects, including a new AI device, according to people familiar with the discussions.
SoftBank also invested in OpenAI during a $6.6bn fundraising round in October, which valued the start-up at $157bn, and the Financial Times reported the Japanese group planned to purchase an additional $1.5bn of stock in the company in November. Son and Altman began having detailed talks on Stargate in the months before this week’s announcement, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.
While Altman’s infrastructure plans had been in the works for well over a year.
Stargate is incorporated in Delaware, with OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and MGX each taking stakes in the company. The group will appoint an independent chief executive and board, according to people with knowledge of the plans.
The company would be split into an operational unit, tasked with building and running the data centres and headed by OpenAI, and a unit responsible for raising capital, run by SoftBank, a person familiar with the project said.
Work is already under way on a first facility in Abilene, Texas.
Data centre start-up Crusoe has been building that facility for Oracle since June 2023. Crusoe secured $3.4bn in financing from Blue Owl in October to help fund its development. Oracle is expected to buy about $7bn worth of chips to power the Texas site and will provide that computing power to Microsoft, which will use it to power OpenAI.
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OpenAI and Nvidia among companies building Stargate AI infrastructure in UAE
OpenAI and Nvidia will join other companies to build Stargate UAE, an artificial intelligence infrastructure cluster, in a sister project to the recently unveiled push to expand AI infrastructure in the United States.
Appearing alongside President Donald Trump in January, the CEOs of OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle said they would create a new company, called Stargate, to build out AI infrastructure in the US. The companies said they plan to invest up to $500 billion into the project in the coming years.
On Thursday, those three companies, as well as Nvidia, Cisco and local champion G42, announced in a statement their partnership to build Stargate UAE in Abu Dhabi. The project’s first part, a 200-megawatt AI “cluster,” is expected to go live in 2026, they said.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said in the statement that the project in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates is “a step toward ensuring some of this era’s most important breakthroughs – safer medicines, personalized learning and modernized energy – can emerge from more places and benefit the world.”
In a separate statement on its website, OpenAI said Stargate UAE has the potential to provide AI infrastructure and computing capacity within a 2,000-mile radius, reaching up to half the world’s population. The project, agreed in close coordination with the US government, is the first international deployment of Stargate, OpenAI’s AI infrastructure platform, the company also noted.
For his part, Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, said the project in the UAE would “power the country’s bold vision – to empower its people, grow its economy and shape its future.”
G42 will build the facility, with OpenAI and Oracle operating it, while Nvidia will provide some of the most advanced chips available.
Stargate UAE will run in the recently announced data center complex in Abu Dhabi, which will have 5 gigawatts of capacity – enough to power a major city.
The complex will be built by the US and the UAE and will eventually span 10 square miles.
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Artificial Intelligence
Stargate’s First AI Data Center in Texas:
Stargate’s AI push begins in Texas.
Here are 10 key facts about the massive data center launched by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank.
A new vision for America’s role in artificial intelligence: a $500 billion public-private infrastructure initiative known as Stargate. At the heart of this initiative is a sprawling new data center under construction in Abilene, Texas, an ambitious project meant to power the next generation of AI.
1. The massive $500 billion AI project kicks off in Texas
Abilene, a quiet West Texas city better known for oil rigs and cattle ranches, is now the launchpad for what could be the biggest AI infrastructure project in America. The first Stargate AI data center, a joint effort by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank, is rising on a 900-acre property west of Dallas.
2. The players: OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and Crusoe
Stargate is a collaboration involving OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank, with support from Trump.
Each partner contributes distinct capabilities. OpenAI will operate the center and serve as its main customer. Oracle is leasing the site and providing server infrastructure. SoftBank is handling capital investment.
The physical buildout is led by Crusoe, a Denver-based infrastructure startup focused on AI compute. “I’ve never built anything of this scale,” said Chase Lochmiller, CEO of Crusoe, in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek.
3. $15 billion and counting
According to The Wall Street Journal, Crusoe Energy, which is tasked with constructing the site, has secured $11.6 billion in new capital, bringing the total investment in the Abilene data center to approximately $15 billion.
The campus is set to grow from two to eight buildings, each filled with advanced AI chips. Each building will reportedly house up to 50,000 Nvidia Blackwell processors, engineered to train advanced AI models.
4. The power behind the power: Stargate built its own gas plant
A significant challenge for a facility of this magnitude is energy. The Abilene site is expected to require 1.2 gigawatts — enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes. To meet this demand, Crusoe and its partners are building an on-site natural gas power plant to secure uninterrupted electricity.
“One of the things that really surprised me… was just how many things feed into the mainline,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview.
5. A boon for Abilene
Altman said the city’s flexibility on energy and infrastructure made it an ideal first location. Abilene’s local government offered major tax incentives, and the city has committed to supporting the project’s water needs, which are lower than usual, thanks to a cooling system that recycles liquid.
“It will impact the rest of the economy — our restaurants, our home builders — with that many new people coming in and taking these jobs,” Abilene Mayor Weldon Hurt said.
While large data centers typically yield few permanent roles, Crusoe has committed to creating 357 full-time roles after construction. The bigger win may be the ripple effect for local businesses and the attention Abilene is suddenly getting from investors, developers, and tech vendors.
6. Microsoft is sidelined but not shut out
OpenAI’s primary cloud partner has been Microsoft. But the Stargate project marks a shift. Even Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff chimed in on X, saying Stargate marked the end of the “honeymoon” between OpenAI and Microsoft.
In January, OpenAI revised its contract with Microsoft, allowing partnerships with other providers as long as Microsoft retained first-refusal rights.
While Microsoft is not financially backing Stargate, it remains listed as a technology partner. Meanwhile, Oracle will lease the Abilene facility and manage the servers.
7. Critics call it ‘chaotic’ and ‘fake’
Not everyone believes Stargate can deliver on its ambitious promises. Elon Musk called it “fake,” while Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, one of the researchers behind the AI scaling theory that inspired Stargate, dismissed the effort as “chaotic.”
Still, Altman remains confident: “We need more compute and more capital,” he says.“ We want to have access to a lot of the machinery to make AI and run AI.”
8. Speed is the name of the game
Crusoe began construction in June 2024. The first two buildings are expected to go live in the first half of 2025. The second phase — six additional buildings — began in March 2025 and is expected to be operational by mid-2026.
“We’re trying to deliver on the fastest schedule that a 100-megawatt-or-greater data center has ever been built,” Lochmiller told reporters.
9. The name ‘Stargate’ isn’t just marketing
Altman said the name “Stargate” was inspired by an early OpenAI data center design that resembled the sci-fi portal from the 1994 film. “The hardest part was figuring out what the shape of the deal should be,” he said, referring to the entity’s structure.
10. Next stops: Amarillo, Oregon, and beyond
If successful in Abilene, the Stargate model could be replicated across the U.S. Crusoe is eyeing Amarillo, Texas, for the next site. OpenAI has also scouted Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Internationally, a separate AI data center in Abu Dhabi is in development, though it will not operate under the Stargate LLC entity.
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OpenAI’s First Stargate Site to Hold Up to 400,000 Nvidia Chips
The first data center complex for OpenAI’s $100 billion Stargate infrastructure venture will have space for as many as 400,000 of Nvidia Corp.’s powerful AI chips — an amount that, if filled, would make it one of the largest known clusters of artificial intelligence computing power.
The construction for the site, in the small Texas city of Abilene, will be completed by mid-2026 with capacity of 1.2 gigawatts of power, according to developer Crusoe, which is set to announce the next phase of development on Tuesday. Though the facility will be large enough to support hundreds of thousands of advanced AI chips, it’s unclear how many have been committed to the project.
The Stargate joint venture was unveiled by OpenAI, SoftBank Group Corp. and Oracle Corp. at a White House event in January, with the goal of providing the physical infrastructure needed for more advanced AI models from the ChatGPT maker. OpenAI previously said Stargate will expand to as many as 10 sites around the country.
Oracle has already agreed to use the Abilene location’s full build for Stargate, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private information. OpenAI currently has plans to use roughly 1 gigawatt of capacity at the facility, one person said. Crusoe declined to comment on the site’s clients. OpenAI declined to comment. Oracle didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Stargate joins a race among leading tech companies to build up capacity of Nvidia’s latest chips. Elon Musk’s xAI recently inked a $5 billion deal with Dell Technologies Inc. for AI servers for a supercomputer in Memphis. Meta Platforms Inc. has said it planned to have computing power equal to 600,000 Nvidia H100s — a previous generation of the company’s data center semiconductors — by the end of 2024. And CoreWeave Inc., an AI-focused cloud provider, has more than 250,000 Nvidia graphics processing units across 32 data centers, it said in paperwork for an public offering earlier this month.
While Stargate was formally announced in January, the Abilene data center complex was in the works before that. “If you came here a year ago, this would be a field of mesquite trees and shrubs,” said Crusoe Chief Executive Officer Chase Lochmiller in an interview. “We broke ground in June of last year and have been on a very accelerated build pace.”
Currently, there are about 2,000 people working on construction for the project, with plans for that to increase to nearly 5,000 workers, Crusoe said. There will be eight data center buildings, each designed to hold as many as 50,000 Nvidia GB200 semiconductors, the company said.
The White House announcement gave the long in-the-works project “tremendous credibility,” said Michael McNamara, CEO of energy startup Lancium, which is also developing the site and first inked an agreement with local officials to build a data center campus in Abilene in 2021. There’s now a sense among “all stakeholders that these projects need to be built bigger and faster,” he said.
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Stargate AI explained: What's in the $500 billion project
2025, the Trump administration announced a new AI infrastructure project called Stargate, led by the private sector and OpenAI. With a total investment of $500 billion over the next four years, this is a substantial financial undertaking intended to strengthen AI innovation in the U.S.
The announcement came shortly after President Donald Trump's inauguration. In the first few weeks of his second term in office, the president signed several tech-related executive orders -- such as his EO on cryptocurrency -- and shared he has complaints with the EU regarding its regulations over Big Tech.
Stargate AI launched as AI dominates media headlines. Advances in generative AI capabilities have been popular with both public and corporate entities, while large-scale models such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek and Grok 3 are attracting international attention. As competition within the AI sector heats up, the need for substantial infrastructure becomes greater -- and this is what Stargate aims to address. Yet, the project has received mixed reactions.
What is the goal of the Stargate AI project?
On a practical level, the goal of the Stargate AI project is to expand existing AI infrastructure for OpenAI by building large-scale data centers for additional support across the nation. The $500 billion total investment has not yet been allocated, but an initial $100 billion is being immediately deployed for building two data centers in Abilene, Texas. Construction has begun and is expected to conclude before the end of 2025. These data centers will help train and run the AI models that OpenAI is developing. The project announcement states that building the infrastructure will create numerous jobs.
More broadly, the Stargate AI project is part of the larger goal of establishing the United States as a leader in AI innovation. In its statement, OpenAI described the Stargate project as one that will "not only support the re-industrialization of the U.S. but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies." Participants intend for this project to make a global statement; in Trump's announcement, he described the project as the largest AI infrastructure project in history.
Who is involved in the Stargate AI project?
Although Trump announced Stargate, the actual project is co-led by several private companies. OpenAI -- the artificial intelligence research organization -- is the primary company attached. Additional technology partners include Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle and Arm. The computing system will be built and operated by a collaboration between OpenAI, Oracle and Nvidia.
There are plans for the $500 billion investment, but the first deployment of $100 billion comes from an initial group of equity funders -- SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and MGX. Softbank and OpenAI are the project's co-leaders, with Softbank assuming financial responsibility and OpenAI assuming operational responsibility.
In addition to this suite of formal partners, Stargate is now accepting requests from potential partners to construct the data centers. These partners will include land and power companies as well as architecture and engineering firms. Benefits and opportunities
Companies across the corporate landscape have embraced AI for tasks such as intelligence automation and greater analysis and understanding. With new advances consistently released, it is evident that the AI sector will continue to evolve -- if it can receive adequate support. By investing $500 billion in AI infrastructure, OpenAI, Softbank and the other partners are laying the foundations for this future innovation.
The benefits and opportunities of this AI expansion include the following:
The empowering of AI researchers with better infrastructure and support.
The expansion of available AI products and services by organizations in various industries such as healthcare and financial services.
The creation of jobs, which OpenAI estimates could reach 100,000 in number.
The chance for the United States to lead the world in AI development.
Ethical, environmental and governance concerns
A large investment in technical infrastructure could provide the support necessary to power considerable innovation -- and that is the intention of Stargate's partners. However, the practical implementation of this large-scale project is more complex.
With AI, there is a risk of bias and misinformation. Depending on the large language models used and the regulations applied, an AI program can carry biases from training that humans are vulnerable to, all while masquerading as a purely objective tool. The opportunity for these algorithms to accidentally discriminate against specific groups -- such as during hiring protocols -- has shown how important it is for all AI to be placed under clear regulations. This is equally true with misinformation; misuse of AI can lead to deepfakes and false narratives, which can cause serious harm. The scale and scope of Stargate's AI operations mean that any bias would be amplified, so there is concern about overusing truly objective data.
Another concern associated with Stargate's AI infrastructure is the environmental effect of data centers. Since the centers require a lot of power to compute vast quantities of data, those powered by electricity may drain the local grid. Data centers also use water to liquid-cool the servers, which increases overall water usage, and use microchips made of nonrenewable resources. The creation of Stargate's vast AI infrastructure has raised some concerns over its potential environmental impact. OpenAI has not announced how its centers will be powered but has expressed that it is open to working with construction partners from various backgrounds, including renewable and sustainable energies.
Lastly, the scale of Stargate makes governance a relevant and sensitive issue. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has previously testified in front of Congress and called for greater regulation of AI technology. Still, the company has not yet outlined its regulatory approach for Stargate AI operations.
Stargate project timeline and developments
Here are some key dates in the Stargate project:
Jan. 21, 2025. Trump announces the Stargate AI project. He is joined by Altman, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. Elon Musk posts "They don't have the money" under OpenAI's Stargate Project announcement on X.
Jan. 31, 2025. OpenAI updates its announcement to include information and resources on its plans and policies for prospective partners in land/power or architecture/engineering.
May 30, 2025. The estimated date for when construction will be completed on the first Stargate data center in Abilene.
Sept. 15, 2025. The estimated date for when construction will be completed on the second Stargate data center in Abilene.
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OpenAI's Stargate AI data centre expansion eyes new locations
Stargate, OpenAI’s $500 billion AI data centre project, has announced plans to expand beyond Abilene, Texas.
The initiative, which was announced last month, plans an initial $100 billion investment in generative AI data centre campuses, with an additional $400 billion to follow over four years.
The first data centre site has been under development since last year at a Crusoe site within Lancium's campus, fully leased by Oracle for OpenAI.
However, despite discussions claiming around 10-20 data centres will be built in Abilene, the exact number and timeline remain uncertain.
In a LinkedIn post, OpenAI chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, said: “AI is transforming the world, and building the infrastructure to power it requires bold, long-term investment. That’s why we launched Stargate with our partners —a $500 billion initiative to supercharge American industry and expand the compute capacity needed to unlock AI’s full potential.”
She added the technology giant is also evaluating potential sites in Pennsylvania, Oregon and Wisconsin, with site visits scheduled for next week.
Meanwhile, the company has also solicited proposals from “top firms to design and build the facilities that will define the future of AI compute”, it added.
She concluded: “AI is moving fast. The next wave isn’t just better chatbots—it’s AI agents that can work independently over long periods of time, solving complex problems in science, medicine, and beyond. That level of intelligence requires massive compute infrastructure, and that’s what Stargate is designed to deliver.
“AI has the power to elevate humanity—but first, we need to build the foundation to support it. That’s what Stargate is: a bold, scalable, and enduring investment in the future.”