Shirin Ghaffary, Brody Ford, and Emily Chang of Bloomberg report that OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank are building a massive $12B AI data center in Abilene, Texas, as part of the $500B Stargate Project to expand U.S. AI infrastructure. Despite skepticism, the team is pushing ahead with ambitious plans for power, speed, and scale, aiming to set a new standard for AI data centers nationwide. They write:
Trucks carrying concrete and electrical wiring plod over red clay, weaving in between cranes and excavators. Two symmetrical buildings stand in a massive plot of land where thousands of people in brightly colored vests work day and night to construct six more near-identical structures that will make up the first site for the Stargate Project.
Stargate is a collaboration of OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank, with promotional support from President Donald Trump, to build data centers and other infrastructure for artificial intelligence throughout the US. The companies have pledged to spend as much as $500 billion, a number so large that it’s hard to believe it’ll actually happen. But at least for this one, in Abilene, Texas, 180 miles west of Dallas, Chase Lochmiller says they’re good for the money. […]
“If we didn’t have to be involved here,” Altman says, “maybe we wouldn’t, if we could just magically spin up all the compute we needed in the sky. But at this kind of scale, you can’t do that.”
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