Stargate: Inside OpenAI's $100B Plan to Build AI Infrastructure

The Stargate Project is a $500 billion joint venture—backed by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX—launched in January 2025 to build AI data centers across the United States. Starting with $100 billion deployed immediately, Stargate targets 10 gigawatts of compute capacity by the end of 2025. It is the largest concentrated AI infrastructure investment ever announced by private entities.

What Is the Stargate Project?

Stargate is a newly formed company, not a product or a model. Its mandate is singular: build the physical infrastructure required to train and run frontier AI at scale, on American soil.

On January 21, 2025, President Donald Trump announced the venture at a White House press conference alongside Sam Altman (OpenAI), Larry Ellison (Oracle), and Masayoshi Son (SoftBank). Trump called it “the largest AI infrastructure project in history.” The initial equity funders are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX—the Abu Dhabi-based sovereign wealth fund. Technology partners include Nvidia, Microsoft, and ARM.¹

The division of responsibility is deliberate: SoftBank holds financial responsibility and Son serves as chairman. OpenAI holds operational responsibility. Oracle serves as the primary cloud infrastructure provider, building and managing the data center campuses.

How Stargate Is Being Built: Sites, Silicon, and Scale

The flagship site is in Abilene, Texas—a 1,200-acre campus roughly 180 miles west of Dallas known as the Frontier campus. As of late 2025, eight data center buildings are operational, making it what Oracle describes as “the world’s largest AI supercluster.”² The site houses hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GB200 GPUs and draws approximately 900 megawatts of power. At full build-out, the Abilene campus alone targets 1.4 gigawatts of capacity across 10 buildings totaling approximately 3.7 million square feet, with rack densities exceeding 250kW.³

In September 2025, OpenAI announced five additional U.S. sites:⁴

• Shackelford County, Texas
• Doña Ana County, New Mexico
• Lordstown, Ohio
• Milam County, Texas
• An undisclosed midwestern location

Combined with Abilene and ongoing projects with CoreWeave, Stargate has committed to nearly 7 gigawatts of planned capacity and over $400 billion in investment within three years—putting it on track to hit the full 10 GW, $500 billion target ahead of schedule.⁵

The Hardware Stack

The compute layer is dominated by Nvidia, but diversifying:

Component	Details
Primary GPU	Nvidia GB200 (NVL72 rack configurations)
Abilene deployment	450,000 Nvidia GB200 GPUs at full build-out6
Nvidia investment	$100 billion committed to Stargate GPU supply7
AMD agreement	6 GW of future capacity8
Custom silicon	OpenAI “Titan” chip (Broadcom, TSMC 3nm, targeting H2 2026)9

The Titan chip development signals OpenAI’s intent to reduce GPU vendor dependency over time—a pattern already established by Google (TPUs), Amazon (Trainium), and Microsoft (Maia).

The Power Problem: 10 Gigawatts and Counting

The Abilene campus alone, at 1.2 GW of draw, consumes enough electricity to power approximately one million four-bedroom homes.¹⁰ Scaling to 10 GW nationally requires more power than most countries use for entire industrial sectors.

Five of these 10 GW sites running on natural gas would require roughly 4% of America’s current natural gas production.¹² OpenAI has stated it plans to use solar, battery storage, small modular reactors (SMRs), and carbon capture to power the network long-term—but SMR deployment at scale before 2030 remains speculative. OpenAI has pledged to “pay its own way” for grid infrastructure rather than relying on ratepayer subsidies.¹³

Environmental concerns are legitimate. Backup diesel generators produce nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, and carbon monoxide. Water use for cooling is substantial. Communities near proposed sites in Texas and New Mexico are already raising objections about air quality and grid load impacts.¹⁴

Who’s Behind Stargate (and Who Isn’t)

The consortium matters as much as the capital. SoftBank brings capital discipline and international access. Oracle brings data center construction and cloud operations at scale—the company began delivering the first GB200 racks to Abilene in June 2025. OpenAI brings the demand: frontier model training and inference that requires dedicated, not shared, infrastructure.

Conspicuously absent: Microsoft. This is notable because Microsoft has been OpenAI’s primary infrastructure partner since 2019. Stargate represents OpenAI building infrastructure it controls directly—a strategic shift away from exclusive Azure dependency. Microsoft still powers a large portion of OpenAI’s current workloads, but Stargate establishes an independent compute base.

Also absent: Elon Musk, who publicly questioned whether OpenAI and SoftBank actually had the capital to execute the plan. Musk’s criticism targeted the funding structure—specifically whether SoftBank’s committed capital was real or contingent. Son later confirmed SoftBank’s commitment.¹⁵

Stargate vs. the AI Infrastructure Landscape

Stargate is not building in a vacuum. The major hyperscalers are each running their own infrastructure arms races:

Company / Project	2026 CapEx (est.)	Notable Initiative
Amazon / AWS	~$200B	Project Rainier (“world’s largest AI compute cluster”)
Alphabet / Google	~$175–185B	42 cloud regions, ongoing expansion
Meta	~$115–135B	Targeting >10 GW total capacity by end of 2026
Microsoft / Azure	Significant (undisclosed)	$80B in unfulfilled Azure orders due to power constraints
Oracle / Stargate	~$50B (136% YoY increase)	Stargate-dedicated capacity: 4.5 GW under Oracle deal16

Combined hyperscaler capital expenditure in 2026 is projected at $660–690 billion.¹⁷ At that scale, Stargate’s $100 billion in year-one spending is aggressive but not anomalous—it’s the concentrated nature of the investment (one entity, one AI workload category) that distinguishes it.

The DeepSeek Question: Does Compute Still Win?

One week after Trump announced Stargate, DeepSeek released R1—a reasoning model that matched or exceeded OpenAI o1 performance at approximately 20x lower inference cost.¹⁸ Nvidia lost $600 billion in market capitalization in a single trading session.

The implied challenge: if DeepSeek can achieve frontier-level reasoning with far fewer chips, does a $500 billion compute bet make sense?

The honest answer is: it depends on the question you’re asking.

DeepSeek demonstrated that algorithmic efficiency can compress the compute gap between well-resourced and modestly-resourced labs. But efficiency gains and raw scale are not mutually exclusive—they compound. A lab that achieves DeepSeek-level algorithmic efficiency and has 10 GW of dedicated compute has a different capability ceiling than one with only efficiency. The race is now on both axes simultaneously.

OpenAI’s own response was pragmatic: Sam Altman called DeepSeek “impressive” and indicated that efficient models would increase overall AI adoption, which increases infrastructure demand, not decreases it. The “Jevons paradox” framing—cheaper AI drives more consumption, which drives more infrastructure need—is the working assumption behind Stargate’s continued investment.

Geopolitical Stakes: America’s AI Infrastructure Bet

The Trump administration framed Stargate explicitly as a national competitiveness initiative. The announcement accompanied America’s AI Action Plan and extensions of CHIPS Act tax credits—all oriented toward domestic manufacturing and reducing Chinese technological access.

China’s response has been a counter-initiative: a domestic compute consolidation program that clusters existing capacity, subsidizes chip production, and virtualizes infrastructure—informally called China’s “Stargate.”¹⁹ The Chinese government has accelerated AI infrastructure spending in direct response to the U.S. announcement.

Nvidia’s export control situation illustrates the hardware dimension of this competition. In April 2025, Trump banned sales of Nvidia H20 chips—previously designed to comply with export controls—to China, resulting in a $4.5 billion charge for Nvidia. China retaliated with export controls on gallium and germanium, materials essential for semiconductor production.²⁰

Stargate’s geographic concentration in the U.S. is not incidental. It is the infrastructure expression of a policy position: that AI capability is a strategic national asset, and that the compute underpinning it should be domestically controlled.

What Practitioners Need to Know

The Stargate project’s implications extend beyond OpenAI’s own products. Several downstream effects will shape enterprise AI decisions over the next 18–36 months:

• Inference pricing pressure: 450,000+ GB200 GPUs dedicated to OpenAI inference means significant capacity expansion. More capacity typically compresses pricing. Enterprises locked into current API pricing contracts should assess re-negotiation windows.
• Custom silicon timelines: OpenAI’s Titan chip targeting H2 2026 production on TSMC 3nm will inform competitive dynamics for model inference costs, following the Google/Amazon/Microsoft pattern.
• Grid as constraint: Power availability, not capital, is the near-term bottleneck. Data center construction pipelines are longer than capital timelines. The 10 GW target faces real physical limits that money alone cannot accelerate.
• Oracle Cloud relevance: Stargate dramatically increases Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s strategic importance. Enterprises already in Oracle ecosystems gain proximity to Stargate compute. Those not in Oracle ecosystems may face access constraints as capacity is prioritized for Stargate workloads.

---

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is the Stargate Project the same as the Microsoft-OpenAI “Stargate” data center project reported in 2024? A: No. The 2024 reports described a Microsoft-OpenAI joint data center project, also internally called Stargate. The January 2025 announcement created a separate, independent entity: Stargate LLC, funded by SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX, with no Microsoft equity stake.

Q: How much of the $500 billion has actually been committed or spent? A: As of late 2025, over $400 billion in investment has been committed across Stargate’s sites within a three-year horizon, with $100 billion deployed in 2025. The $500 billion total spans four years. The Oracle partnership alone represents a commitment exceeding $300 billion over five years.

Q: Does DeepSeek’s efficiency undermine the case for Stargate-scale compute investment? A: Not straightforwardly. DeepSeek demonstrated that algorithmic efficiency can close capability gaps, but more efficient AI typically expands total demand (Jevons paradox). OpenAI and its partners are betting that cheaper inference drives broader adoption, which drives more total infrastructure need—not less.

Q: What happens to OpenAI’s Microsoft Azure relationship now that Stargate exists? A: Microsoft remains a technology partner in Stargate and still hosts significant OpenAI workloads on Azure. Stargate does not eliminate that relationship—it diversifies OpenAI’s infrastructure independence, reducing exclusive Azure dependency over time.

Q: When will the full 10 GW of Stargate capacity be operational? A: The Abilene campus targets full 1.4 GW build-out with first buildings live in H2 2026. The additional five sites are at various stages of permitting and construction. Full 10 GW capacity across all sites is a multi-year buildout with power availability as the primary constraint, not capital.

---

Footnotes

1. OpenAI. “Announcing The Stargate Project.” January 21, 2025. https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/ ↩

2. Data Center Dynamics. “OpenAI and Oracle to deploy 450,000 GB200 GPUs at Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas.” https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openai-and-oracle-to-deploy-450000-gb200-gpus-at-stargate-abilene-data-center/ ↩

3. Data Center Frontier. “Scaling Stargate: OpenAI’s Five New U.S. Data Centers Push Toward 10 GW AI Infrastructure.” https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/machine-learning/article/55319132/scaling-stargate-openais-five-new-us-data-centers-push-toward-10-gw-ai-infrastructure ↩

4. OpenAI. “OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank expand Stargate with five new AI data center sites.” September 2025. https://openai.com/index/five-new-stargate-sites/ ↩

5. SiliconANGLE. “OpenAI to build five more Stargate data centers in the US with Oracle and SoftBank.” September 23, 2025. https://siliconangle.com/2025/09/23/openai-build-five-stargate-data-centers-us-oracle-softbank/ ↩

6. Inside AI News. “Report: 64,000 Nvidia GB200s for Stargate AI Data Center in Texas.” March 7, 2025. https://insideainews.com/2025/03/07/report-64000-nvidia-gb200s-for-stargate-ai-data-center-in-texas/ ↩

7. IntuitionLabs. “OpenAI’s Stargate Project: A Guide to the AI Infrastructure.” https://intuitionlabs.ai/articles/openai-stargate-datacenter-details ↩

8. Ibid. ↩

9. Ibid. ↩

10. Certrec. “Energy Demands for OpenAI’s Stargate Project.” https://www.certrec.com/blog/energy-demands-for-openai-stargate-project/ ↩

11. Defense News. “Power generation challenges could overshadow Stargate AI initiative.” January 24, 2025. https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2025/01/24/power-generation-challenges-could-overshadow-stargate-ai-initiative/ ↩

12. Mark Nelson (@energybants). “PROJECT STARGATE ENERGY ANALYSIS.” X, January 2025. https://x.com/energybants/status/1881860142108377412 ↩

13. Data Center Dynamics. “OpenAI pledges to ‘pay its own way’ to power Stargate data centers.” https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openai-pledges-to-pay-its-own-way-to-power-stargate-data-centers/ ↩

14. Texas Standard. “Texas becomes the epicenter of OpenAI’s $500 billion Stargate Project.” https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/openai-stargate-data-centers-texas-energy-infrastructure/ ↩

15. OpenTools AI. “Elon Musk Criticizes OpenAI’s $500B Stargate Project Amidst Turbulence.” https://opentools.ai/news/elon-musk-criticizes-openais-dollar500b-stargate-project-amidst-turbulence ↩

16. OpenAI. “Stargate advances with 4.5 GW partnership with Oracle.” https://openai.com/index/stargate-advances-with-partnership-with-oracle/ ↩

17. Futurum. “AI Capex 2026: The $690B Infrastructure Sprint.” https://futurumgroup.com/insights/ai-capex-2026-the-690b-infrastructure-sprint/ ↩

18. MIT Technology Review. “AI’s energy obsession gets a reality check.” January 28, 2025. https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/28/1110599/ais-energy-obsession-gets-a-reality-check/ ↩

19. Linkdood Technologies. “China’s ‘Stargate’ New Ambition on AI Supremacy Against the U.S.” https://linkdood.com/chinas-stargate-new-ambition-on-ai-supremacy-against-the-u-s/ ↩

20. Oxford Analytica. “Stargate will reinforce US dominance in AI.” https://www.oxan.com/insights/stargate-will-reinforce-us-dominance-in-ai/ ↩