Box CEO Aaron Levie didn’t mince words following President Trump’s announcement today of the landmark $500 billion Stargate initiative — a collaborative effort between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank Group meant to jump-start the US’ AI infrastructure. Levie hailed the project in a tweet as “one of the most ambitious technology programs we’ve seen in the 21st century.” He also marveled at the timing of its introduction: “To coordinate this all on day 1 is a huge signal for America leading in AI.”
The focus of Stargate, which seems to have been named after the 1994 Roland Emmerich movie, is to build massive data center campuses around the country that are able to handle the powerful consumption needs of AI tools. Buildout of the first such data center is under way now, in the Texas city of Abilene, and the whole thing is a joint effort between initial equity funders SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX, while the key technology partners include Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI.
“We will begin deploying $100 billion immediately,” OpenAI’s Stargate announcement declares. “This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world. This project will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.”
On hand for today’s announcement in the Roosevelt Room at the White House were Oracle’s Larry Ellison, SoftBank chief Masayoshi Son, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — the latter of whom described Stargate as “the most important project of this era,” adding an extra note that surely pleased the new president: “I think if it were a different president, it might not have been possible. But we are thrilled to get to do this.”
As for the specifics of what’s being built, Ellison said that 10 buildings are under construction now. That number will grow to 20, each of which will measure half a million square feet. Such facilities are increasingly necessary, because the growing demand for AI technology has led to a significant uptick in in energy consumption, as advanced machine learning models require vast computational power to operate. That surge in energy usage has, in turn, driven the expansion of data centers, which house the infrastructure and servers needed to support AI’s continuous operations.
As an example of the kinds of AI-related tools these data centers could support, Ellison pointed to the potential for AI to help in the creation of cancer vaccines.
“Little fragments of those [cancer] tumors float around in your blood,” he said. “So you can do early cancer detection. If you can do it using AI, you can do early cancer detection with a blood test and using AI to look at the blood test. Once we gene sequence that cancer tumor, you can then vaccinate the person — design a vaccine for every individual person that vaccinates them against that cancer. That mRNA vaccine, you can make that robotically, again using AI, in about 48 hours.”
