OpenAI said on the 23rd (local time) that a data center has begun operations in Abilene, Texas, the first hub site for Stargate. OpenAI's "Stargate" project to build large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure has begun operating.
Stargate is a four-year, $500 billion (700 trillion won) data construction project jointly announced in January by OpenAI, U.S. software and cloud corporations Oracle, and Japan investment company SoftBank. Abilene, Texas, is the project's first hub, and the site consists of eight buildings. One building has gone into operation, and another is in the completion stage.
The Abilene site, about 180 miles (289 km) west of Dallas, consists of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and racks of Nvidia's latest AI chip, the GB200, in sets of 72. The complex will require about 900 MW (megawatts) of power to run eight buildings and hundreds of thousands of AI chips, and each building will house about 60,000 chips.
OpenAI and Oracle invited the media for the first time that day, along with politicians including Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, for an on-site tour. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also visited the Abilene site with executives from Oracle and SoftBank. At a press conference, Altman said, "We plan to invest $400 billion to build five additional data centers across the United States."
Stargate, the joint venture of these corporations, said it is additionally building data center complexes at two more sites in Texas, one in New Mexico, one in Ohio, and one in an undisclosed Midwest location. When the new data centers are completed, they will have up to 7 GW (gigawatts) of power capacity. One GW corresponds to one nuclear power plant, and 7 GW is on par with an entire city.
This expansion brings the plan to invest $500 billion in U.S. data centers and AI infrastructure over the next four years a step closer. The new facilities will significantly expand the computing capacity to support OpenAI's AI chatbot ChatGPT, which has 700 million weekly active users.
Of the new sites, three—Texas, New Mexico, and the undisclosed Midwest location—will be developed with Oracle for more than 5.5 GW. This includes a 600 MW expansion of the existing site near Abilene. In July, OpenAI signed an agreement with Oracle for up to an additional 4.5 GW of development, which corresponds to about $300 billion of the $400 billion investment plan. The other two are located in Ohio and another site in Texas, and will be developed with SoftBank over the next 18 months for a total capacity of 1.5 GW.
This is SoftBank's first joint development project for Stargate. OpenAI said it is developing the facility with power supplied together with SB Energy, a SoftBank affiliate, and that it is scheduled to go into operation next year. OpenAI said the new Stargate sites will be financed with a mix of cash and liability, and that a new $100 billion investment agreement with Nvidia will facilitate liability financing. It added that the new Stargate sites will create tens of thousands of jobs across the United States and that it is continuing to review new candidate sites for additional data center expansion.
CEO Altman emphasized, "We will do our best on infrastructure as much as possible, because it is the driving force that allows us to deliver amazing technology and fundamental products and services," adding, "We will always live in a world with computing constraints, but we don't want to experience the same level of difficulty again."