On Donald Trump‘s first full day in office for his second presidential term, he gathered Oracle founder Larry Ellison, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SoftBank chief Masayoshi Son at the Roosevelt Room in the White House to unveil a $500 billion artificial intelligence project named after a 1994 Roland Emmerich sci-fi film about intergalactic portals.
The plan for the project, titled Stargate, is to build campuses that can provide energy for increasingly powerful artificial intelligence tools, which sap much more energy than, say, a typical Google search. The first data center campus was announced to be located in Abilene, Texas, with SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and MGX as initial equity funders and Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA and OpenAI named as tech partners.
“We have to get this stuff built,” Trump said in his prepared remarks that the president riffed off of, promising 100,000 jobs in the U.S. “So they have to produce a lot of electricity and we’ll make it possible for them to get that production done very easily at their own plants if they want, where they’ll build at the plant, the AI plant they’ll build energy generation and that will be incredible.”
Trump put it in terms that he was most familiar with: “I was in the real estate business. These buildings, these are big, 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 son David’s Skydance deal to take over Paramount Global — took the podium, he added more detail. “The data centers are actually under construction. The first of them are under construction in Texas,” Ellison said. “Each building is a half a million square feet. There are 10 buildings currently being built, but that will expand to 20 and other locations beyond the Abilene location, which is our first location.”
While artificial intelligence tools have flooded the market since OpenAI revealed ChatGPT to the public in November 2022, tech giants are now contending with Wall Street’s increasing focus on how AI will be used by everyday consumers and ultimately become profitable for the companies.
The race to build infrastructure domestically is one key component for the industry, and Silicon Valley executives have lobbied Donald Trump to help speed the way to build data centers in the country. “We’re going to make it as easy as it can be,” said the president. “This is money that normally would have gone to China.”
Trump observed, “AI seems to be very hot. It seems to be the thing that a lot of smart people are looking at very strongly.”
In a signal to the White House, the Oracle CEO, the SoftBank chief and the OpenAI mogul all sat down for a joint interview on Fox News with Bret Baier following the reveal of the announcement. Altman, notably, said of the plans, “I think if it were a different President, it might not have been possible. But we are thrilled to get to do this.”
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