OPENAI, Oracle and SoftBank develop Stargate with five new AI data centers

The event was a kind of victory tower, while the CEO of Openai, Sam Altman and the new Oracle CO-PDG, Clay Magouryk, rejected the criticisms that questioned the progress of their high-level high-level “Stargate” infrastructure project.

During Tuesday’s event, the two companies, joined by SoftBank in Japan, announced a big step forward for Stargate, praising an expansion of the Abilene site, as well as plans to build five massive complexes of data centers in the United States in the coming years. In total, the initiative provides hundreds of billions of dollars in investment in a project of an astounding scale. In Abilene, only a crew of 6,400 workers has already moved massive quantities of soil to flatten the hills and has established enough fiber optic cable to wrap the earth 16 times.

“We cannot be delayed in the need to bring together the infrastructure to ensure that this revolution occurs,” said Altman d’Openai during a Q&R with journalists. “What you have seen today is like a small fraction of what this site will eventually be, and this site is only a small fraction or a building, and all this will still not be enough to meet the request for a chatgpt,” he said, referring to the flagship product of Openai.

Construction testifies to this the imposing expectations surrounding AI, such as technological companies such as Openai, Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta Race to set up the infrastructure necessary to fuel their latest language models. In July, the meta-PDG, Mark Zuckerberg, said that the company spent hundreds of billions of dollars to build a network of data centers with names like Prometheus and Hyperion to create a “superintendent”.

Sharon Goldman

Abilene, as well as the newly announced data centers, are all part of the Stargate project, a joint initiative of half a billion dollars that Optaai revealed in January which aims to create a national spine to form its always more launched AI models. Stargate was presented as a public-private partnership with the Trump administration-in part of an attempt to maintain the AI ​​calculation infrastructure in the United States and push past regulatory obstacles.

Among the guests and speakers of the Abilene event, the Senator of Texas Ted Cruz, the member of the Congress Jodey Arrington, and the local dignitaries, including the mayor of Abilene and even a county judge. Each of them has emphasized the attraction of Texas as a hub for IA infrastructure. “Sam, Clay, welcome to Silicon Prairie,” said Arrington on stage, referring to the CEOs of Openai and Oracle.

The five new Stargate projects – in Texas, in New Mexico, Ohio, and in an undisclosed Midwest location – will bring the current Stargate pipeline to nearly 7 gigawatts and more than $ 400 billion in investment over the next three years. In the world of the data center, the “gigawatts” are shortcuts for the quantity of electricity that an installation can draw – and therefore the amount of AI that it can provide. An installation of 1 gigawatt, for example, requires enough substations, cooling and transmission to maintain the demand for power of nearly a million houses.

Until recently, the installations of the data center held and exploited by the largest cloud computing companies – the so -called hyperscalers – have exceeded a few hundred megawatts. But Microsoft and Meta recently unveiled multi-Gigawatt projects in Wisconsin and Louisiana.

And in a sign of the increasingly growing issues in the AI ​​arms race, Openai and its partners promised Tuesday to reach a target of 10 Gigawatt and $ 500 billion by the end of 2025, schedule. Oracle stressed that the Abilene campus, in Texas, is already operational on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), continues to progress quickly and is on the right track to provide Openai with the “largest supercuster in the world” when it is fully built.

Tuesday’s announcement included an expansion in Abilene on another site which will attract 600 megawatts, which can offer around 450,000 to 600,000 electricity demand houses, which represents about four times the population of Abilene. The new projects – in Texas, in New Mexico, in Ohio, and in a location of the non -disclosed Midwest, will bring the current Stargate pipeline to nearly 7 gigawatts and more than $ 400 billion in investment in the next three years.

Three of the new sites will be built with Oracle, expanding a July agreement to develop up to 4.5 capacity gigawatts worth more than $ 300 billion over five years. Two others – in Lordstown, Ohio and Milam County, Texas – will be developed with SoftBank, which has promised “fast construction” facilities that can quickly evolve in several gigawatts. The five sites emerged from a selection competition of January sites which attracted more than 300 proposals of 30 states, stressing how local governments have courted the Stargate project.

But the expansion of Stargate is certain to arouse criticism on several fronts. In Abilene and other communities, welcoming mega data centers of AI, residents and activists are concerned with compromises: billions of tax networks, the risk of aggravation of local air quality and the probability that permanent jobs are more than the securities suggest. National energy analysts, on the other hand, warn that multi-Gigawatt campuses could force fragile electrical networks and lock huge new water and fossil fuels at a time when public services are already struggling to follow the growth of AI.

For example, Stargate’s planned site in Dona Ana County, New Mexico, has acquired mixed reactions, opponents raising concerns about the use of water and pollution, arguing that these problems prevail over economic advantages. According to a presentation of the county, the project will provide 800 permanent jobs and 2,500 construction jobs over three years.

The Upenai Stargate update has been updated one day after its joint announcement with Nvidia, the first IA flea manufacturer, who is committed to investing up to $ 100 billion in OpenAi infrastructure. Under the letter of intention, NVIDIA will contribute systems powered by GPU capable of drawing up to 10 gigawatts of electricity – the equivalent demand of 7 to 10 million houses.

During Tuesday’s questions and answers, Altman d’Openai that the most important announcement of Nvidia was not only the new sites, but the funding model behind them. Rather than paying billions for fleas in advance, Openai will be able to distribute these costs over time as an income scale.

“We can do a bit like paying as you go, like what is on the cloud services,” he said. “Flea is a huge percentage of the CAPEX, and it is more difficult for us to pay for all this, because our income arrives over the many months that customers manage a service among these chips. This really helps projects like this.”

But with regard to OpenAI energy requests, Senator Ted Cruz launched the issues in geopolitical and local terms. “Message number one: America will beat China in the AI ​​race,” he said. Message number two? “Texas is zero land for AI,” he added. “What do you want when you build ia data centers? Number, you want abundant and low cost energy. Welcome to the great state of Texas.”