OpenAI Teams Up With Oracle and SoftBank to Build 5 New Stargate Data Centers

OPENAI plans To build five new data centers in the United States as part of the Stargate initiative, the company announced on Tuesday. The sites, which are developed in partnership with Oracle and SoftBank, bring the current planned capacity of Stargate to nearly 7 gigawatts, – almost the same amount of power as seven large -scale nuclear reactors.

“The AI ​​is different from the Internet in many ways, but one of them is the amount of infrastructure that is necessary,” the CEO of Openai Sam Altman said on Tuesday during a press briefing in Abilene, Texas. He argued that the United States “cannot be late on this subject” and that “the innovative spirit” of Texas provides a model to develop “larger, faster, cheaper, better”.

Three of the new sites, in the county of Shackelford, in Texas; Doña Ana County, New Mexico; And a still location to be disclosed in the Midwest, is being developed in partnership with Oracle. This decision follows an agreement that Oracle and Openai announced in July to develop up to 4.5 gigawatts of the capacity of the American data center in addition to what the two companies are already building in the first installation of Stargate in Abilene.

OPENAI claims that the new data centers, as well as an expected extension of 600 megawatts of the Abilene site, will create more than 25,000 jobs on site, although the number of workers required to create data centers generally eclipses the amount necessary to maintain them later.

The two remaining sites are directed by Openai and SB Energy, a subsidiary of the Soft bank which develops solar and battery projects. These are located in Lordstown, Ohio and Milam County, Texas.

Stargate is one of the many major American technological infrastructure projects that have been announced since President Donald Trump took office at the start of the year. OPENAI said in January that the commitment of $ 500 billion and 10 gigawatt between the Chatgpt manufacturer, SoftBank, Oracle and MGX “would guarantee American leadership in AI” and “would create hundreds of thousands of American jobs”.

Trump praised the Mammoth initiative just two days after returning to the White House, promising that it would accelerate American progress in artificial intelligence and help the United States compete with China and other nations. In July, Trump announced an AI action plan which called for rapid development of infrastructure and limited administrative formalities while the United States tried to beat other countries in the quest for advanced AI. “We think we are in an AI race,” said the Tsar of the White House, David Sacks at the time. “We want the United States to win this race.”

Openai initially presented Stargate as a “new company” which would be chaired by the CEO of Softbank, Masayoshi Son. Now, however, leaders close to the project say that this is an umbrella brand used to refer to all projects in the Openai data center, with the exception of those developed in partnership with Microsoft.

The flagship site of Abilene is mainly owned and operated by Oracle, Openai acting as principal tenant, according to managers close to the project. The construction, which is managed by the startup of Data Center Crusoe, is on the right track to be completed by mid-2026, according to sources close to the project. It already works on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and supports the workloads of training and OPENAI inference, these sources add.