On Donald Trump’s first full day in office for his second presidential term, he brought together Oracle founder Larry Ellison, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SoftBank chief Masayoshi Son in the White House’s Roosevelt Room to unveil a $500 billion artificial intelligence project named after a 1994 project. Roland Emmerich science fiction film about intergalactic portals.
The plan for the project, called Stargate, is to build campuses capable of providing power for increasingly powerful artificial intelligence tools, which consume much more energy than, say, a typical Google search. It was announced that the first data center campus would be located in Abilene, Texas, with SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and MGX as initial backers and Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA and OpenAI named as technology partners.
“We have to build this whole thing,” Trump said in his prepared remarks by the president, promising 100,000 jobs in the United States. “So they have to produce a lot of electricity and we will give them the opportunity to get that production will be done very easily in their own factories if they want, where they will build the factory, they will build the AI factory for energy production and it will be amazing.
Trump put it in the terms he knew best: “I was in the real estate business. These buildings are large and beautiful buildings. They’re going to employ a lot of people.
When Ellison — whom Trump called the “CEO of everything,” perhaps a nod to his involvement in his son David’s Skydance deal to take over Paramount Global — took the podium, he added more details. “The data centers are currently under construction. The first of these are being built in Texas,” Ellison said. “Each building is half a million square feet. There are 10 buildings currently under construction, but this will expand to 20 and other locations beyond Abilene, which is our first location.
As artificial intelligence tools have flooded the market since OpenAI revealed ChatGPT to the public in November 2022, tech giants now face growing attention from Wall Street over how AI will be used by everyday consumers and will ultimately become profitable for businesses.
The race to build infrastructure domestically is a key driver for the industry, and Silicon Valley executives have been pressuring Donald Trump to help speed up the construction of data centers in the country. “We’re going to make it as easy as possible,” the president said. “This is money that would normally have gone to China.”
Trump observed: “AI seems to be very hot. It seems to be something that a lot of smart people are very interested in. »
In a signal to the White House, the Oracle CEO, SoftBank chief and OpenAI mogul all sat down for a joint Fox News interview with Bret Baier after the announcement was revealed. Altman, notably, said of these plans: “I think if the president had been different, this might not have been possible. But we are delighted to be able to do it.
