Stargate (US AI Infrastructure Joint Venture)

What it is

Stargate LLC is a joint venture incorporated in Delaware and announced at the White House on January 21, 2025. Its four founding partners are OpenAI (operational lead), SoftBank Group (financial lead; Masayoshi Son serves as chairman), Oracle Corporation, and MGX, an Abu Dhabi-based investment firm. The venture's purpose is to build AI computing infrastructure, primarily large-scale data centers housing Nvidia GPU clusters, to power OpenAI's model training and inference in the United States. The total commitment is US$500 billion over four years, with US$100 billion earmarked for immediate deployment. Per reporting by The Information, the initial equity stakes were SoftBank and OpenAI each at roughly 40 percent, with Oracle and MGX each contributing approximately US$7 billion, and the balance sourced from debt financing and limited partners.

History

Planning for a large-scale OpenAI compute vehicle began as early as 2022 under a narrower Microsoft-OpenAI data center arrangement that Stargate ultimately superseded. The January 2025 White House ceremony brought together US President Donald Trump, Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO), Larry Ellison (Oracle chairman), and Masayoshi Son (SoftBank CEO), framing the venture as a US industrial-policy response to AI competition. Ground broke at the flagship site in Abilene, Texas, in early 2025, with construction managed by Crusoe Energy Systems on a campus projected to reach 1.2 GW. The first two Abilene buildings went operational in September 2025, with Nvidia GB200 Blackwell racks active for model training. That same month, OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank announced five additional US sites, expanding the planned portfolio to approximately 7 GW and over US$400 billion in planned investment over three years.

Current state

As of mid-2026, Abilene, Texas, remains the only operational Stargate site, running at an estimated 0.3 GW across four of eight completed buildings. Six further campuses are under active construction: Shackelford County, Texas (2.0 GW projected, developer Vantage, on-site natural gas); Doña Ana County, New Mexico (2.2 GW, STACK Infrastructure); Milam County, Texas (1.2 GW, SB Energy, SoftBank-owned); Port Washington, Wisconsin (1.3 GW, Vantage, 70 percent renewable, the "Lighthouse"); Saline Township, Michigan (1.4 GW, Related Digital, the "Barn"); and Lordstown, Ohio (under 0.3 GW, SoftBank and Foxconn). Total planned capacity exceeds 9 GW by 2029, equivalent to roughly 20 million H100-equivalent GPUs. Oracle owns the hardware at most sites; SoftBank owns the Milam County and Ohio facilities. OpenAI reversed an earlier plan to scale Abilene to 2.1 GW, redirecting that capacity to other campuses.

Relationships

Stargate ties together overlapping capital, technology, and policy relationships. SoftBank's Vision Fund ecosystem anchors both equity and debt-guarantee capacity for the venture. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is the contracted compute provider at most sites, binding Stargate's output directly to Oracle's enterprise cloud business. Nvidia is the primary chip supplier, with GB200 NVL72 systems confirmed at Abilene and next-generation GB300 clusters expected at later sites. MGX connects Stargate to Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth; the UAE's G42 has entered a separate but parallel arrangement with Nvidia and OpenAI for international AI infrastructure. The Abilene campus financing and the Michigan Barn campus are the two most detailed public build-outs disclosed as of mid-2026.

What to watch

Whether Stargate's full US$500 billion commitment materializes is unresolved. Debt financing at this scale requires long-term offtake agreements, and OpenAI's revenue trajectory must underwrite them. Power procurement at several natural-gas-powered sites faces US permitting and grid-interconnection queues that routinely run two to three years. Hyperscaler competition is intensifying: Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon each announced comparable capital expenditure cycles in 2025-2026, which could erode any OpenAI-specific compute advantage. Community opposition is already documented: Lordstown, Ohio, enacted a ban on new data centers following Stargate's announcement, and similar resistance has emerged in Michigan. The governance balance between SoftBank (financial control) and OpenAI (operational control) has not yet been publicly tested under stress.