Stargate: Trump Announces Massive AI Investment

The key here is that this is private investment coming from Open AI, Oracle and Softbank. The CEO’s of all three companies were in the White House for the announcement of a partnership called Stargate that will invest hundreds of billions of dollars creating new data centers across the US.

“What we want to do is we want to keep it in this country,” Mr. Trump said. “China is a competitor, others are competitors. We want to be in this country, and we’re making it available. 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.”

Executives from the companies are expected to commit $500 billion into Stargate over the next four years. Details of the new partnership were not immediately provided. 

In the briefing, Ellison said 10 data centers for the project were already under construction in Texas, and that more were planned. Sources previously told CBS News that Stargate would start with a data center project in Texas, and eventually expand to other states. 

This project has been in the works for months already but there was concern from the companies involved that red tape was going to slow things down. I’m guessing that’s part of the reason this is initially being built in Texas and not in California.

The initial plans for Stargate go back to the Biden administration. Tech news outlet The Information first reported on the project in March 2024. OpenAI has long relied on Microsoft data centers to build its AI systems, but it has increasingly signaled an interest in building its own data centers.

OpenAI wrote in a letter to the Biden administration’s Commerce Department last fall that planning and permitting for such projects “can be lengthy and complex, particularly for energy infrastructure.”

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said that he’d spoken with Trump after his election win and promised to invest at least $100 billion in the US. He said Trump’s response was that he should make it $200 billion. Now the plan is to invest up to $500 billion in the next four years. Masayoshi said it would not have happened if Trump had not won the election. “This is the beginning of our golden age,” he said, echoing Trump’s inauguration speech.

At least one executive order related to this project has already been signed.

On Monday, Trump signed a wave of executive orders, which included rescinding a Biden-era executive order that established safety guidelines for generative AI. The order had required large language models to share safety test results with the US government and tasked federal agencies with assessing potential risks.

Big Tech executives, including Amazon’s (AMZN) Jeff Bezos, Meta’s (META) Mark Zuckerberg, and Apple’s (AAPL) Tim Cook, were in attendance at the president’s inauguration on Monday as the sector cozied up to Trump in the wake of his November election win.

Here’s video of the full announcement. There’s some talk from Altman and Ellison about the potential of AI to revolutionize medical treatments and cure diseases at a pace we haven’t seen before. Obviously the benefits of this will benefit the whole world over time but better the control of that be in our hands than in China’s. Here’s hoping American leads the way into something that looks more like the 21st century future we all imagined.