Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
Donald Trump is set to unveil billions of dollars of private investment in a massive new artificial intelligence infrastructure venture backed by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle.
Dubbed Stargate, the joint venture was poised to receive an initial cash injection of $100bn from the tech giants, rising to as much as $500bn over the next four years, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Microsoft was also involved in the project as a technology partner, one of the people said on Tuesday.
Stargate will be announced by the president at the White House on Tuesday afternoon, with SoftBank chief Masayoshi Son, OpenAI boss Sam Altman and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison in attendance.
The plans, which were first reported by CBS News, come as tech executives look to court Trump, who began a second term in the White House on Monday surrounded by many of the industry’s biggest names.
Stargate aims to boost capacity to train and run new AI models. It will initially build a data centre project in Texas before expanding into other states, the people briefed on the plans said.
OpenAI declined to comment, while Microsoft, Oracle and SoftBank did not respond to requests for comment. Other investors and technology partners were also expected to join the project.
The rapid development of AI systems over the past two years has stretched American infrastructure, with data centres emerging as a particular bottleneck. Cutting-edge models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude chatbots require enormous amounts of data and computing power to train and run.
That has spurred discussions between AI executives, their commercial partners and the government about upgrading national infrastructure.
Earlier this month, Hussain Sajwani, chair of Dubai-based property developer Damac, announced plans to invest at least $20bn in US data centres, at a meeting with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Leading figures in the AI sector, including OpenAI’s Altman, have argued that better infrastructure is essential for developing the next stage of AI models and competing with China for dominance of the technology.
Altman said earlier this month the Trump administration could boost domestic AI companies with “US-built infrastructure and lots of it”.
“The thing I really deeply agree with the president on is, it is wild how difficult it has become to build things in the United States. Power plants, data centres, any of that kind of stuff,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg.
In his inaugural address on Monday, Trump promised the US was on the brink of a “thrilling new era of national success”, though he did not make any specific mention of AI technology.
Last month, Trump called a separate SoftBank promise to invest $100bn in the US “a monumental demonstration of confidence in America’s future”. It was not clear whether the Stargate investment would form part of SoftBank’s earlier pledge.
Additional reporting by Rafe Uddin and Alex Rogers
Read the full article here
