Under the Trump administration, OpenAI and other members of the tech sector are making a push to establish AI dominance in the U.S.
On Tuesday, the ChatGPT maker announced The Stargate Project, a $500 billion venture to invest in AI infrastructure. OpenAI, Oracle, Japanese company SoftBank, and Emirati firm MGX lead the venture as initial equity funders, with British chipmaker Arm, U.S. chipmaker Nvidia, and longtime OpenAI partner Microsoft also contributing as technology partners.
Stargate will be building data centers to support the massive computing power required for running and developing AI models and has already broken ground in Texas. OpenAI is deploying $100 billion immediately to kick off the project.
“This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world,” said the OpenAI announcement. “This project will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.”
President Trump spoke about the project with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son standing by his side on Tuesday. “What we want to do is we want to keep it in this country… China is a competitor, others are competitors. We want to be in this country, and we’re making it available.”
The motivation behind Stargate is to continue to be the global leader in AI investment. “I’m gonna help a lot through emergency declarations because we have an emergency, we have to get this stuff built. So they have to produce a lot of electricity. And we’ll make it possible for them to get this production done easily, at their own plants if they want,” Trump continued.
That said, The Stargate Project was already underway before Trump took office, as first reported in March 2024 by The Information. According to the outlet, OpenAI and Microsoft had been drawing up plans for building a supercomputer to support the increasing need for large amounts of computing power.
Now, the plan has evolved under Trump’s support and partnerships with chipmakers, which is critical for developing and improving AI models.
Not all of Trump’s new tech buddies are excited about the Stargate venture. Newly appointed DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) officer Elon Musk, who is also embroiled in a lawsuit with OpenAI replied to its X post, “They don’t actually have the money.”
Whatever the case, we’re sure to learn more details about Stargate soon.
