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OpenAI and SoftBank said Tuesday they would launch a massive U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure project, a move that Donald Trump praised as a “declaration of confidence in America.”
The joint venture, called Stargate, plans to spend $100 billion on Big Tech infrastructure projects, with that figure rising to as much as $500 billion over the next four years, the groups said. It was not immediately clear how Stargate would obtain funding, but a person involved in the project said it planned to bring in additional investors.
“This monumental undertaking is a resounding vote of confidence in America’s potential under a new president,” Trump said Tuesday evening at the White House, flanked by SoftBank Chairman Masayoshi Son, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.
Trump added that Stargate would build the “physical and virtual infrastructure to power the next generation of advances in AI, and that includes building massive data centers.”
The announcement comes as tech executives seek to woo Trump, who is seeking to make significant investment gains in the U.S. early in his term. The president said Stargate would create 100,000 jobs “almost immediately” and “secure the future of technology” in America.
SoftBank will have ultimate financial responsibility for the new company, while OpenAI will assume operational responsibility. Sohn will take over as chairman of the joint venture.
Abu Dhabi’s AI-focused sovereign wealth fund MGX and Oracle are also providing funding for the project, while SoftBank-owned Arm, Microsoft and Nvidia will be technology partners.
Stargate aims to increase the capacity for training and running new equipment AI Models. The company will initially build a data center project in Abilene, Texas, with construction already underway, according to the companies, before expanding to other states.
The rapid development of AI systems over the past two years has strained America’s infrastructure, with data centers in particular proving to be a bottleneck. State-of-the-art chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude require enormous amounts of data and computing power to train and operate.
This month, Hussain Sajwani, chairman of Dubai-based property developer Damac, said announced plans to invest at least $20 billion in US data centers during a meeting with Trump at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Leaders in the AI sector, including OpenAI’s Altman, have argued that better infrastructure is essential to developing the next level of AI models and competing with China for technology supremacy.
Altman said this month that the Trump administration could empower domestic AI companies with “US-built infrastructure and lots of it.”
“I really agree wholeheartedly with the president that it has become incredibly difficult to build anything in the United States. Power plants, data centers and the like,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg.
In his inaugural address on Monday, Trump promised that the US was on the verge of an “exciting new era of national success” but did not specifically mention AI technology.
Last month Trump called a separate SoftBank pledge to invest $100 billion in the USA “a monumental demonstration of confidence in America’s future”. A person familiar with the matter said Stargate will be a key part of that previously announced commitment.
“This is the beginning of a golden age,” Son said Tuesday, adding that the company would not have made the investment if Trump had not won re-election, which Ellison and Altman also confirmed.
Son has long represented a broad vision of what SoftBank can do in AI, from robotics to data centers, all underpinned by its crown jewel, UK-based semiconductor designer Armwhich, in his opinion, should produce its own chips.
The SoftBank founder has also taken a significant stake in OpenAI and speaks regularly with Altman.
Shares of SoftBank rose more than 10 percent in Tokyo on Wednesday following the news.
Coinciding with the Stargate announcement, Microsoft announced Tuesday that it would change the structure of its contract with OpenAI to allow the startup to use competitors’ cloud computing services.
The move means Microsoft is giving up its position as OpenAI’s exclusive cloud service provider, but retaining the right of first refusal. This follows a one-time exemption last year that allowed OpenAI to purchase cloud services from Oracle.
Microsoft said several “key elements” of its partnership with OpenAI would remain in place until the end of 2030, when its current contract, including revenue-sharing agreements, is completed.
Additional reporting by Rafe Uddin in San Francisco and Alex Rogers in Washington
