Larry Ellison, chairman of Oracle Corporation, speaking with President Trump, SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, announcing Stargate at the White House in January (Jabin Botsford/Getty Images)

OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank announce five new AI data center sites, putting Stargate ahead of schedule

Two of the sites will be in Texas, one in New Mexico, one in Ohio, and one in the Midwest.

David Crowther

9/24/25 5:38AM

Since Oracle’s $300 billion deal with OpenAI grabbed the headlines a few weeks ago — sending Oracle’s stock soaring and briefly making its chairman the world’s richest person — some of the biggest questions involved what the cloud computing company would do to deliver all the capacity it had promised, and how that would be financed.

Now, we’re getting more specifics on these fronts: OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank announced late last night that they would be expanding Stargate with five new AI data center sites. Separately, Bloomberg is reporting that Oracle is looking to tap the US corporate bond market for $15 billion today, which includes a 40-year offering.

The data center build-out plans put the much-hyped Stargate initiative, announced by President Trump and the companies’ leaders back in January, ahead of schedule. Per a press release from OpenAI:

“The combined capacity from these five new sites — along with our flagship site in Abilene, Texas, and ongoing projects with CoreWeave — brings Stargate to nearly 7 gigawatts of planned capacity and over $400 billion in investment over the next three years. This puts us on a clear path to securing the full $500 billion, 10-gigawatt commitment we announced in January by the end of 2025, ahead of schedule.”

Three of the sites appear to fall under the $300 billion OpenAI and Oracle deal signed in July. Those three new sites are to be located in Shackelford County, Texas; Doña Ana County, New Mexico; and an unannounced site somewhere in the Midwest. The Stargate flagship site, in Abilene, Texas, is also being mooted for a potential expansion of 600 megawatts of capacity. Together, the Abilene upgrade plus the three new sites can deliver over 5.5 gigawatts of capacity, according to OpenAI, and will create over 25,000 on-site jobs.

The other two newly announced sites will be located in Lordstown, Ohio, and Milam County, Texas, and are being developed through a partnership between SoftBank and OpenAI, with the sites able to scale up to 1.5 gigawatts of capacity, per OpenAI’s statement.

The data center in Abilene, Texas, is reportedly already up and running on Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure, and the first Nvidia GB200 racks were delivered to the site in June.

As of 5 a.m. ET on Wednesday, Oracle’s stock was 0.4% higher. Nvidia, which jumped on Monday as investors cheered news of its bumper ~$100 billion OpenAI investment but dipped yesterday, has also been trading 0.7% higher in Wednesday’s premarket, as the company deepens its vertical integration across the AI supply chain.

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FT: Meta considering “tens of billions” in new capital to fund AI

Just days after Google announced a monster $85 billion upsized equity raise, the extremely profitable Meta is seeking to sell “tens of billions of dollars” in stock, according to a new report from the Financial Times.

Meta is planning on spending between $125 billion and $145 billion on AI capital expenditure this year alone.

Shares dropped more than 5% on the news.

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Meta is supercharging its subscription businesses

The free-app giant never really cared about recurring revenue. Now, it’s launching paid plans for all sorts of stuff.

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FT: Anthropic staff helping the NSA use Mythos for offensive cyberattacks

Anthropic’s Mythos AI model was deemed too dangerous to release to the public, with the company citing its ability to orchestrate novel cyberattacks.

And that’s just what the National Security Agency is doing, with the help of Anthropic staff embedded at the agency, according to a report from the Financial Times.

Only a small number of companies and US allies have been given access to the advanced model, which means America’s adversaries have not had the chance to shore up their defenses against the AI model’s new offensive capabilities.

The arrangement is especially unusual as the Pentagon has deemed Anthropic’s AI a national security supply chain risk — effectively blacklisting it for defense work — in response to the company’s refusal to allow its technology to be used for any legal application, which could include autonomous killing or mass surveillance. Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the determination.

US National Security Agency using Anthropic’s Mythos for cyber attacks

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Longtime Tesla bear JPMorgan upgraded Tesla and raised its price target to $475 from $145

For more than a decade, JPMorgan was Wall Street’s most stubborn Tesla skeptic, anchored by auto analyst Ryan Brinkman’s strict focus on traditional car fundamentals and near-term delivery numbers.

But JPM recently handed coverage of the stock to a new analyst, Rajat Gupta, who is throwing that playbook out the window. In a note Friday, the firm upgraded Tesla to “neutral” from “underweight” and raised its price target 228% to $475 from $145. (The analyst consensus on FactSet is $403.) Instead of focusing on the company’s struggling vehicle business, the new analyst is orienting himself more toward Tesla’s idea of the future, now modeling Tesla’s physical AI and robotaxi fleets all the way out to the year 2040.

Here are the main reasons for the capitulation:

Looking past the car lot: Gupta argues that Tesla “is at the forefront of physical AI, entering uncharted TAMs” and therefore “deserves the benefit of the doubt to be valued on LT earnings potential” rather than near-term speed bumps.
Unmatched vertical integration: Tesla’s control over everything from battery cells to custom silicon gives it a massive moat. JPM notes this starting point advantage is “unmatched at an industrial level scale” and “still somewhat under-appreciated and misunderstood.”
The AWS flywheel effect: Deploying Optimus robots inside its own factories “should not only lower COGS for the base automotive business, but more importantly, help validate the product at an industrial scale.” Gupta called it “a classic flywheel effect, somewhat analogous to AWS and Kiva at AMZN.”

For Tesla bulls who have argued for years that this is an AI company and not a carmaker, JPM’s sudden $3.9 trillion valuation model is the ultimate validation.

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