By Steve Holland
(Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced private sector investment of up to $500 billion to fund artificial intelligence infrastructure, aiming to outpace rival countries in this business-critical technology area.
Trump said ChatGPT creator OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle were considering a joint venture called Stargate, which he said would build data centers and create more than 100,000 jobs in the United States.
These companies, along with other Stargate backers, have committed $100 billion for immediate deployment, with the remainder of the investment to be made over the next four years.
SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison joined Trump at the White House for the launch.
The project’s first data centers are already under construction in Texas, Ellison said during the press conference. Twenty will be built, each representing half a million square feet, he said. The project could power AI that analyzes electronic health records and helps doctors care for their patients, Ellison said.
Executives gave Trump credit for the news. “We wouldn’t have decided to do this,” Son told Trump, “unless you won.”
“For AGI to be built here,” Altman said, referring to a more powerful technology called artificial general intelligence, “we would not be able to do it without you, Mr. President.”
It was not immediately clear whether the announcement was an update of a previously reported company.
In March 2024, The Information, a technology news site, reported that OpenAI and Microsoft were working on plans for a $100 billion data center project that would include an artificial intelligence supercomputer also called “Stargate” scheduled to launch in 2028.
ENERGY SAVING DATA CENTERS
The announcement on Trump’s second day in office follows the reversal of former President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI, which aimed to reduce the risks that AI poses to consumers, workers and national security.
AI requires enormous computing power, increasing demand for specialized data centers that allow technology companies to link thousands of chips together in clusters.
“They have to produce a lot of electricity, and we will give them the ability to do that production very easily in their own factories if they want to,” Trump said.
As U.S. electricity consumption increases due to AI data centers and the electrification of buildings and transportation, about half the country is at increased risk of electricity shortages over the next decade , the North American Electric Reliability Corporation said in December.