Dive Brief:
- OpenAI and Oracle plan to develop 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity as part of the Stargate AI infrastructure push, the companies announced Tuesday.
- “This significantly advances our progress toward the commitment we announced at the White House in January to invest $500 billion into 10 gigawatts of AI infrastructure in the U.S. over the next four years,” OpenAI said in a blog post. “We now expect to exceed our initial commitment thanks to strong momentum with partners including Oracle and SoftBank.”
- The capacity expansion will bring OpenAI's Stargate capacity under development to over 5 gigawatts and running around 2 million chips. OpenAI said the additional capacity push will also create more than 100,000 construction and operations roles.
Dive Insight:
The largest infrastructure providers are paying up big time to secure a larger footprint as they continue to push AI tools and services onto customers.
The U.S. grid has been flooded with data center expansion plans, but some experts question the sustainability of proposals. Utility Dive reported in May that speculative interconnection requests were five to 10 times more than the number of actual data centers. London Economics International also called into question high-end data center buildout forecasts earlier this month.
Still, the rate of expansion is notable. Google said it would spend more than $25 billion in Pennsylvania on data centers last week. The announcement came just months after it committed $3 billion to facilities in Virginia and Indiana. AWS pledged $100 billion to the cause earlier this year, and Microsoft laid out plans for an $80 billion investment as well.
Stargate, a joint effort bringing OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, Nvidia, Microsoft and others together, carries a $500 billion price tag — and seems to be rising.
“Easy to throw around numbers, but this is a gigantic infrastructure project,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a post to X. “We are planning to significantly expand the ambitions of Stargate past the $500 billion commitment we announced in January.”
OpenAI’s latest commitment comes just a week after the company introduced ChatGPT agent, which integrates its Operator tool with deep research capabilities to carry out tasks.
