Stargate: OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle Announce $500 Billion AI Infrastructure Push

President Donald Trump joined OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle at the White House on January 21, 2025 to announce Stargate — a joint venture pledging up to $500 billion over four years to build AI data-center infrastructure across the United States, beginning with $100 billion in the first year. The first campus in Abilene, Texas, planned for 1.2 gigawatts of power, went operational in 2025.

The project quickly expanded: by mid-2025 OpenAI and Oracle added 4.5 gigawatts of capacity — roughly the output of five nuclear reactors — bringing the total above five gigawatts and about two million advanced AI chips, led by Nvidia's GB200 Grace-Blackwell superchips. Nvidia committed up to $100 billion toward OpenAI deployments, AMD agreed to supply six gigawatts of GPUs, and Samsung and SK Hynix dedicated a large share of global memory output to the effort. SoftBank's $6.5 billion acquisition of chip designer Ampere added custom-silicon capabilities to the venture.

Stargate is both a bet and a stress test for the chip industry: multi-gigawatt campuses demand cutting-edge GPUs, high-bandwidth memory, advanced packaging, power and cooling at unprecedented scale. Supply constraints — from HBM memory to electricity — remain the key variables, and new U.S. semiconductor tariffs introduced in 2025 added cost uncertainty to data-center builds. Analysts call it the largest computing-infrastructure build-out in history.

Source: White House announcement, January 21, 2025; Reuters; TechCrunch/Bloomberg coverage. Reference: Stargate Project — Wikipedia