The White House has announced that the half-trillion-dollar Stargate Project will kick off in Texas to boost domestic AI research.
The Lone Star State will host the project’s first phase, which aims to boost artificial intelligence research in the United States. On January 21, President Donald Trump and tech leaders from OpenAI and Texas-based Oracle announced the massive $500 billion initiative at the White House.
According to Larry Ellison, co-founder and chief technology officer of cloud-computing company Oracle, the monumental project will start in Abilene, roughly 150 miles west of Fort Worth, before expanding elsewhere. While details remain limited, Oracle is reportedly already leasing a 200-megawatt data center in the city.
OpenAI, the maker of the AI platform ChatGPT, is also involved in the project, as is the Japan-based investment firm SoftBank Corp. SoftBank’s founder and CEO, Masayoshi Son, will lead the Stargate Project.
Trump clarified that the $500 billion would be separate from the $100 billion in projects SoftBank had previously pledged to invest.
News of the AI project comes on the heels of another investment unveiled earlier this month. On January 7, then-President-elect Trump announced a $20 billion data center project bankrolled by Emirati billionaire Hussain Sajwani, head of luxury real estate development company Damac Properties. Texas is one of eight states involved in the first phase of this data center expansion initiative.
SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX will all serve as initial equity funders in Stargate, with SoftBank and OpenAI as the lead partners. Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI will be “the key initial technology partners,” according to a release from OpenAI.
The half-trillion-dollar investment is expected to be spread over the next four years, and it will be used to build new AI infrastructure in the United States for OpenAI.
“We will begin deploying $100 billion immediately. This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world. This project will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies,” read the release.