OpenAI Identifies 5 New Data Center Sites For $500B Stargate Venture
The massive data center build-out from ChatGPT creator OpenAI keeps growing.
The firm this week said it is building five new artificial intelligence data center campuses across the U.S. as part of its $500B Stargate development partnership with Oracle and SoftBank. And it said its total spending on data centers could eventually reach twice that amount.
This second phase of the Stargate development initiative will include sites in Texas, New Mexico and Ohio, as well as a yet-to-be-named state in the Midwest, giving OpenAI access to more than 7 gigawatts of computing capacity within the next three years, the company announced Tuesday.
Speaking at the Abilene Stargate site Tuesday, OpenAI's executives outlined their vision to ultimately have 20 gigawatts of AI computing capacity globally — infrastructure that would come with a price tag of close to $1T.
OpenAI claims this new wave of data center build-out brings the total investment in Stargate to more than $400B — on track to reach the $500B investment promised by the leaders of OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank during the initiative’s unveiling alongside U.S. President Donald Trump in January.
Calling it the largest infrastructure push of the internet era, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman indicated to CNBC Wednesday that more large-scale projects under the Stargate banner will be announced in the months ahead.
“This is what it takes to deliver AI,” Altman told CNBC. “Unlike previous technological revolutions or previous versions of the internet, there’s so much infrastructure that’s required, and this is a small sample of it.”
Three of the new campuses — in Shackelford County, Texas, Doña Ana County, New Mexico and a to-be-named location in the Midwest — are being funded through a partnership between OpenAI and Oracle. Announced in July, the two firms signed an agreement to invest more than $300B to build 4.5 gigawatts of new Stargate capacity.
Shackelford County, near the site of the first Stargate data center in Abilene, is home to a 1.4 gigawatt data center being developed by Vantage Data Centers that has been linked to Oracle. Vantage announced its “Frontier” campus in August, a $25B project with 10 data centers totaling 3.7M SF across 1,200 acres. Also in August, Bloomberg reported that Oracle is expected to lease at least part of the project, which is already under construction with an anticipated 2026 completion date.
In New Mexico, Oracle and OpenAI will reportedly lease and operate the controversial Project Jupiter data center campus being developed by Stack Infrastructure and BorderPlex Digital Assets. Approved by Doña Ana County officials just last week after months of local opposition, the $165B campus is planned to consist of 4 buildings on 1,400 acres, with an expected delivery date in 2026. Oracle has reportedly signed an 18-year lease for the campus.
The other two Stargate sites announced this week are being developed through collaborations between OpenAI and Softbank. Located in Lordstown, Ohio, and Milam County, Texas, the pair of projects will scale to a combined 1.5 gigawatts over the next 18 months, according to OpenAI. Ultimately, “multiple gigawatts” of additional capacity may be added on the sites.
In Lordstown, SoftBank has already broken ground on the conversion of a 6M SF former GM assembly plant into an AI data center, which the firms say is on track to be operational by next year. The plant was previously owned by Taiwan-based electronics giant Foxconn, which will reportedly continue to operate within the facility alongside the Stargate partners, according to local media.
Stargate’s planned facility in Milam County, located around 70 miles northeast of Austin, is being developed in partnership with SoftBank subsidiary SB Energy, which will provide power infrastructure for the site. The energy developer first announced plans in May for a $3B data center campus in Milam County, where it already operates a large-scale solar farm called the Orion Solar Belt.
Few data center development efforts have garnered as much attention as Stargate thanks to its Oval Office unveiling just two days into Trump's second term.
Pitched as a $500B investment in building 10 gigawatts of AI data centers across the U.S., the initiative is led by OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank, with a range of major tech and investment players, like Emirati sovereign wealth fund MGX and chipmaker Nvidia, also involved.
Although Stargate was initially presented as a specific development joint venture, over time, the principals have begun using the moniker to refer to a range of deals to expand OpenAI’s access to computing capacity. This includes the $11.9B contract OpenAI signed with AI cloud provider CoreWeave in March — capacity that was included in 7 gigawatts of anticipated Stargate computing power that the firm announced Tuesday.
Only one Stargate data center is even partially in operation today: the initiative’s flagship site in Abilene, Texas.
In May, a joint venture of Primary Digital Infrastructure, developer Crusoe and asset manager Blue Owl Capital secured $11.6B in debt and equity to finance the second phase of the 1.2-gigawatt campus. While construction will not be complete until 2026, the first GPUs were up and running at the site in June.
On Monday, AI chip giant Nvidia pledged to invest $100B in OpenAI to support 10 gigawatts of new data center capacity. Just a week earlier, the two firms reportedly both invested hundreds of millions of pounds in London-based developer Nscale to build UK data centers.
“With what we see on the horizon for how much people are going to want to use this, and what the quality of intelligence we can deliver is with more compute, we’re very confident at this point that we’re going to need much more compute to deliver on that,” Altman told CNBC.
