OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank announced plans to build five more AI data centers as part of their ambitious Stargate Project. The new sites will bring Stargate’s total data center capacity to nearly seven gigawatts and more than $400 billion in investment over the next three years, according to OpenAI.
OpenAI said on Tuesday that it will open three new sites with Oracle in Shackelford County, Texas, Dona Ana County, New Mexico and an undisclosed site in the Midwest. Two more data center sites will be built in Lordstown, Ohio and Milam County, Texas by OpenAI, Japan’s SoftBank and a SoftBank affiliate.
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This project was first announced by President Donald Trump in January, and involved plans to spend up to $500 billion to build AI infrastructure. Earlier reports said that the companies decided to scale back on the project following various setbacks, and that they would be focusing on building a small data center by the end of this year, likely in Ohio.
“AI can only fulfill its promise if we build the compute to power it,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement.
This data center is expected to create 25,000 onsite jobs. It follows Nvidia saying on Monday that it will invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI and supply data center chips.
OpenAI also opened its first Stargate data center, in Texas. This data center, which is located in Abilene, Texas, about 180 miles west of Dallas, is up and running, filled with Oracle Cloud infrastructure and racks of Nvidia chips.
READ: OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle to invest $500 billion in AI data centers under Trump (
“People are starting to recognize just the sheer scale that will be required,” Friar said. “We’re just getting going here in Abilene, Texas, but you’ll see this all around the United States and beyond,” OpenAI finance chief Sarah Friar told CNBC. While one building in the Abilene site is operational, the other is nearly complete. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang personally engaged in last-minute negotiations with Altman over the weekend to get in on the action, according to CNBC.
Friar also said that the scale of the project’s construction was necessary to supply the amount of compute required to operate OpenAI’s models. “What we see today is a massive compute crunch,” she said. “There’s not enough compute to do all the things that AI can do.”
The Stargate name will reportedly refer to all OpenAI infrastructure projects going forward. Together with other partners, the company says they are ahead of schedule to meet their full 10-gigawatt commitment by the end of 2025.