On Tuesday, three leading tech companies revealed their plans to establish a new business, Stargate, to expand artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US.
The business, which President Donald Trump referred to as the “largest AI infrastructure project in history,” was announced Tuesday afternoon at the White House by Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
With plans to invest up to $500 billion in Stargate over the next few years, the firms will first invest $100 billion in the project.
According to Trump, the project is anticipated to generate 100,000 new employees in the US.
Trump hinted that Stargate will construct data centres across the nation as part of “the physical and virtual infrastructure to power the next generation of AI.”
According to Ellison, the organisation’s first data project, spanning one million square feet, is currently being built in Texas.
AI leaders have been warning for months that to support their aspirations for artificial intelligence in the upcoming years, additional data centres, as well as the chips, electricity, and water resources to run them, are required.
Altman stated on Tuesday that he believes this endeavour will be the most significant of this era. “This would not be possible without you, Mr. President.”
One of the largest data centre operators in the US is Oracle. The expansion of AI infrastructure is anticipated to cost billions of dollars, and SoftBank has the kind of deep finances required to finance it.
Given that AI has the potential to affect everything from the economy to military capabilities, Altman has previously pushed US leaders to support that infrastructure buildout to guarantee that the US stays ahead of China in the AI arms race.
According to reports, the CEO of OpenAI met with Masayoshi Son, the CEO of Softbank, last year to ask for funding for new semiconductor facilities that would produce AI chips.
Last month, Altman, who was present at Trump’s inauguration on Monday, told Fox News that he thinks Trump will “be very good at” luring investments in AI infrastructure to the US and that he “looks forward to working with his administration on it.”
“The United States has very important infrastructure. AI is a little different from other software in that it requires a lot of power, computer chips, data centres, and infrastructure. We need to build that here and have the best AI infrastructure in the world to be able to lead with the technology and the capabilities,” Altman stated in the interview.
