Big Spenders
Returning president Donald Trump is preparing to approve a $500 billion investment into private sector-developed AI infrastructure, according to reporting from CBS.
The project is reportedly a joint venture between ChatGPT creator OpenAI, the Japanese investment group SoftBank, and the software behemoth Oracle, and will see the building of new datacenters — in short, massive, wildly energy-intensive computing facilities — in the US. The first of these facilities, according to the report, will be constructed somewhere in Texas.
The effort is reportedly called “Stargate,” because of course it is. More investors are reportedly expected to join the project, though it’s unclear who they might be.
The money going into this thing is staggering: company executives are “expected to say they plan to commit $100 billion initially,” reads the CBS report, and “pour up to $500 billion into Stargate over the next four years.”
News of Stargate’s forthcoming announcement comes fresh on the heels of the Trump Administration’s reversal of the Biden-era executive order on AI — which, though largely vague and legally toothless, provided some kind of regulatory roadmap for AI development and investment in the US.
Now, with the repeal of that order, the AI industry is once again free to enjoy a deregulatory playground. And Trump, in addition to making good on his campaign promise to axe the Biden-era AI roadmap, appears to be giving AI’s private sector the green light to compute, baby, compute.
Foreshadowing
We should note that executives for SoftBank and OpenAI declined to comment on the deal. But OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended this week’s inauguration and, like many other high-powered tech executives in recent weeks, donated cash to Trump’s inaugural fund. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, meanwhile, is a longtime Trump ally and donor, and Softbank CEO and billionaire Masayoshi Son was one of many tech leaders to take a trip to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate post-election.
As the New York Times reported at the time, Trump declared during a December press conference that SoftBank would be making a $100 billion investment into US projects, and that the investment would center on tech and AI. The announcement was otherwise scant on details, but it’s hard to imagine Trump’s statement wasn’t in reference to the reported Stargate venture.
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