Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
OpenAI and SoftBank on Tuesday said they planned to launch a massive new US artificial intelligence infrastructure project, in a move Donald Trump lauded as a “declaration of confidence in America”.
The joint venture, dubbed Stargate, is looking to spend $100bn in Big Tech infrastructure projects, rising to as much as $500bn over the next four years, the groups said late on Tuesday. It was not immediately clear how Stargate would obtain funding but one person involved in the project said they intended to bring on additional investors.
“This monumental undertaking is a resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential under a new president,” Trump said from the White House on Tuesday evening, flanked by Son, OpenAI boss Sam Altman and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.
Trump added that Stargate would will build the “physical and virtual infrastructure to power the next generation of advancements in AI and this will include the construction of colossal data centres”.
The announcement comes as tech executives look to court Trump, who is eager to notch significant investment wins in the US early in his term. The president said Stargate would create 100,000 jobs “almost immediately” and keep “the future of technology” in America.
SoftBank has ultimate financial responsibility for the new company, with OpenAI taking operational responsibility. Tokyo-based SoftBank’s chair Masayoshi Son will chair the joint venture.
Abu Dhabi state AI fund MGX and Oracle are also providing funding for the project, while SoftBank-owned Arm, Microsoft and Nvidia are technology partners.
Stargate aims to boost capacity to train and run new AI models. It will initially build a data centre project in Abilene, Texas — construction of which is already under way, according to the companies — before expanding into other states.
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.
“This project will not only support the reindustrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies,” OpenAI said in a statement.
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”. One person familiar with the matter said Stargate would be a significant part of that $100B previously announced commitment.
“This is the beginning of a golden age,” said Son on Tuesday, adding that the company would not have made the investment had Trump not won re-election, comments echoed by Ellison and Altman.
Son has long espoused a sweeping vision for what SoftBank can do in AI, from robotics to data centres, all underpinned by his crown jewel, UK-based semiconductor designer Arm, which he wants to see producing its own chips. The SoftBank founder has also taken a significant stake in OpenAI and speaks regularly to Altman.
SoftBank’s shares rose by as much as 7.5 per cent in Tokyo as investors got the first concrete details of Son’s grandiose AI vision.
“We have concrete details on SoftBank’s AI ambitions for the first time and . . . when we look at what they have hinted they’ll do before, this is probably the best starting point,” said Kirk Boodry, a SoftBank analyst at Astris Advisory in Tokyo, pointing to the group’s “high-profile partners” in the Stargate plan.
Additional reporting by Rafe Uddin and Alex Rogers
Credit: Source link
