TMTPOST -- Stargate, a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle Corp. and SoftBank Group Corp., is ramping up artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure expansion in the United States.
Credit：OpenAI
OpenAI on Tuesday announced five new AI datacenter sites in the U.S. under Stargate. The new datacenters, together with the flagship site in Abilene, Texas, and ongoing projects with CoreWeave, will bring Stargate to nearly 7 gigawatts (GW) of planned capacity and more than $400 billion investment over the next three years. That accounts for 80% of total commitment for the venture.
OpenAI and its partners unveiled in January that Stargate intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure in the U.S., with the initial deployment of $100 billion. OpenAI on Tuesday said these companies are ahead of schedule to meet their full $500 billion, 10 GW commitment by the end of 2025.
OpenAI finance chief Sarah Friar told CNBC that project being broken ground on Tuesday are laying foundations for compute that won’t come online until 2026, starting with Nvidia next-generation Vera Rubin chips.
OpenAI said two of the new planned datacenters will be located in Shackelford County, Texas and Doña Ana County, New Mexico, and another site is in the Midwest, which is expected to announce later. Oracle is working on these three projects. These projects, combined with an additional potential expansion of 600 megawatts near the flagship site in Bilene, can deliver over 5.5 GW of capacity.
SoftBank said it has broken ground on two other datacenters in Lordstown, Ohio, which is on tarck to be operational next year, and in Milam County, Texas. These two sites can sale to 1.5 GW over the next 18 months. The site in Milam will be developed in partnership with SB Energy, a renewable energy company backed by SoftBank, which is providing power infrastructure for a fast-build datacenter site.
OpenAI suggested some of new datacenters that Oracle is developing are under an agreement announced in July. The two companies on July 22 said they will develop an additional 4.5 GW of Stargate data center capacity in the U.S. The additional data center capacity will create over 100,000 jobs across construction and operations roles in the U.S., and pushes the total Stargate AI data center capacity under development to over 5 gigawatts, according to an OpenAI blog post.
OpenAI has signed a deal to purchase $300 billion worth of computing power from Oracle over roughly five years, marking one of the biggest cloud contracts ever signed, the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The contract, starting in 2027, requires 4.5 GW of power capacity, roughly comparable to the electricity amount consumed by about four million homes, per the report.
The debut site in Abilene is posied to be the world’s largest AI supercluster once fully built, according to Oracle executives visiting the eight-building complex on Tuesday. One of the buildings is already operating, and the second is nearly complete. Each building is expected to house about 60,000 of server racks and each server rack holds 72 Nvidia Corp.’s GB200 chips. Oracle said the Abilene campus and nearby expansion is employ over 6,000 construction workers daily, and will provide nearly 1,700 jobs onsite when fully operational, with thousands of more indirect jobs estimated to be created.
