Donald Trump announced on Tuesday January 21 a new artificial intelligence (AI) project, including investments of “at least $500 billion” in AI infrastructure in the United States. Called “Stargate”, it brings together the “cloud” (remote computing) specialist Oracle, the Japanese investment giant SoftBank, and the generative AI start-up OpenAI. Donald Trump’s presentation was made at the White House, in the presence of the directors of these three companies.
SoftBank boss Masayoshi Son said the joint venture would “start deploying $100 billion immediately,” with the goal of reaching a total of $500 over four years. Donald Trump explained that this commitment was in addition to that already made by Masayoshi Son in mid-December, relating to 100 to 200 billion dollars of investments in the American technology sector within four years. SoftBank’s participation in the “Stargate” project sparked market euphoria: the Japanese group’s stock soared 10.61% at the close on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Wednesday.
According to a joint press release published Tuesday, in addition to SoftBank, Oracle and OpenAI, “Stargate” is financially supported by the MGX investment fund, backed by the United Arab Emirates.
Data center construction
The president and co-founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison, revealed that the project mainly focused on the construction of data hosting and processing centers, the famous “data centers”. “The first ones are already being built in Texas,” near Abilene (north-east), shared the manager. The development of the “cloud”, of AI in general and of generative AI in particular requires immense data storage capacities, which has boosted the need for “data centers”.
Donald Trump assured that the creation of “Stargate” would create “almost immediately more than 100,000 jobs” in the United States. This new joint company “will build the physical and virtual infrastructures to support the next generation of AI,” said the American president.
The partners want to bring together, around “Stargate”, “companies in the data center infrastructure sector, from energy supply to real estate, including construction and equipment”, according to the press release. Masayoshi Son added that American semiconductor giant Nvidia was a partner in the project.
“We couldn’t have done this without you.”
These investments “are money that normally would have gone to China or other countries, but more particularly to China,” said Donald Trump. Each in turn, the three bosses thanked the latter. “We couldn’t have done this without you,” said Sam Altman, head of OpenAI. On Monday, Donald Trump reversed an executive order issued by his predecessor Joe Biden on AI security, a move interpreted as a transition to a more moderate regulatory approach.
“Stargate” marks a turning point for the generative AI prodigy OpenAI, which had until now relied on the infrastructure of its partner Microsoft and will now be able to count on its own data centers. OpenAI nevertheless took care to say that it “continued its work with Microsoft”, which is its 49% shareholder. In a report published in September, OpenAI pleaded with the US government for the creation of giant 5 gigawatt (GW) data centers, at an estimated cost of $100 billion.