The Half A Trillion Dollar Stargate AI Venture Is Now Falling Victim To The Disagreements Between OpenAI And SoftBank
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Stargate was supposed to cement America’s ascendancy in the still-fledgling AI sphere, which is widely considered the defining technology of the 21st century. Yet, this gargantuan venture, worth around half of a trillion dollars, is now falling victim to the disagreements between its principal backers: OpenAI and SoftBank.
As a refresher, President Trump had announced the Stargate venture back in January, entailing at least $500 billion in investments to build out the requisite AI infrastructure in the US over the next four years.
Stargate was supposed to rope in a number of tech companies, with OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX initially identified as key nodes of this ambitious venture. However, the project has devolved into a duopoly of sorts, with OpenAI and SoftBank retaining primary influence over Stargate’s direction.
Now, as per the reporting by the Wall Street Journal, it appears that the project is falling victim to the disagreements between its principal backers.
Back in January, OpenAI and SoftBank had committed to investing $100 billion in Stargate “immediately,” inviting skepticism from Elon Musk, who had bluntly declared that “they [Stargate participants] don’t actually have the money.”
Well, six months later, SoftBank and OpenAI have massively scaled back their joint investment goals for the year, having agreed to build only a small data center in Ohio by the end of 2025.
What’s more, the venture has failed to close even a single data center deal under the auspices of the Stargate venture so far.
OpenAI is reportedly hesitant to build out Stargate’s infrastructure on sites linked to SB Energy, an energy development firm backed by SoftBank.
Also, while SoftBank holds the trademark for Stargate, OpenAI has liberally used the venture’s high-profile tag in projects that do not involve SoftBank, such as for data centers in Abilene and Denton – both located in Texas.
Interestingly, OpenAI is moving full-steam ahead in signing data center deals, even without SoftBank.
For instance, the creator of GPT LLMs recently inked a mammoth 4.5GW data center deal with Oracle, which entails payments of $30 billion per year to Oracle starting in around three years. For context, OpenAI’s Sam Altman is on record for saying that a 5GW data center capacity requires an investment of around $100 billion.
OpenAI has also inked a separate deal with CoreWeave, that adds $4 billion to an existing $11.9 billion for using CoreWeave’s gigantic GPU stash.
Critically, OpenAI has singlehandedly concluded $100 billion worth of data center deals so far this year, which aligns with Stargate’s investment target for 2025. These investments, however, do not explicitly include SoftBank.
Of course, officially OpenAI and SoftBank remain committed to Stargate, with the duo recently asserting that they will together build 10GW of data center capacity in the US over the next few years. So far, however, these commitments lack a definitive follow through.
