Rising ambitions and skyrocketing costs: Here’s what we know about Project Stargate

As tech giants like Meta, xAI, Microsoft, and Amazon race to build colossal AI data centers, one massive undertaking stands apart from the rest in its ambitious goals: Project Stargate.

In the eight months since Stargate was announced — backed by partners OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and Nvidia, which have pledged hundreds of billions toward it — the scale and ambition of the project have grown.

Still, details are scant and questions have arisen about how the companies involved will raise the eye-popping amounts of capital needed for the pricey data centers described in the plan. 

Let’s dive into the details of what we know about Stargate’s plans in the US, and look at the questions that remain unanswered. 

“Project Ludicrous”

In January 2025, on the first full day of his second term, President Trump announced the largest “AI infrastructure project, by far, in history” standing alongside SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son, Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison, and OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman.

Trump described Project Stargate as a new American company that will be investing $500 billion in the US and creating over 100,000 jobs “almost immediately.” The plan was audacious and at a scale without precedent. 

Ellison, Son, and Altman spilled some details: 

• The first site was a massive data center already under construction in Abilene, Texas.

• The project consisted of 10 sites, and each building would be 500,000 square feet.

• The plan would expand to 20 sites.

• Son said SoftBank would invest $100 billion “immediately,” and the remaining $400 billion over four years.

While plans were being developed, the effort went by the code name “Project Ludicrous.”

OpenAI’s initial press release identified the equity partners in Stargate as SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX — United Arab Emirates’ state-owned investment fund. Arm, Microsoft, and Nvidia were listed as technology partners. 

Stargate I, the first site of the project, will reportedly cost about $12 billion to build. That’s not counting the 64,000 Nvidia GB200 GPUs that will fill the data center, totaling 1.2 gigawatts of computing power, the cost of which is in the tens of billions.  

After the January announcement, we didn’t hear much about the project until March, when Bloomberg reported that SoftBank was seeking a $16.5 billion bridge loan for it — the largest dollar-based loan that the company has taken on, resulting in two ratings agencies warning about it creating potential financial strains. 

In May, Bloomberg reported that SoftBank’s initial $100 billion investment had yet to materialize, even though it was supposed to happen “immediately,” and that the company had yet to formalize details of the financing. April’s trade chaos and the shocking effects of DeepSeek’s R1 model spooked investors, complicating SoftBank’s fundraising efforts. 

4.5, 7, 10 gigawatts

In July, the companies gave an update on the project and announced an expansion. Oracle and OpenAI outlined an agreement to develop an additional 4.5 gigawatts of capacity in US data centers under the Stargate umbrella, expanding upon the original 1.2 gigawatts planned for Stargate I. OpenAI said parts of the Stargate I facility were up and running and that deliveries of the first of 2 million Nvidia GPUs had arrived.  

A flurry of eye-popping AI infrastructure deals between Stargate partners followed.

In September, when Oracle announced its first-quarter earnings, shares rocketed up 30% when the company announced it had “remaining performance obligations” — signed deals that were backlogged — that were “likely to exceed half-a-trillion dollars.” The next day it was reported that part of that backlog was a huge deal with OpenAI.

OpenAI had signed an agreement with Oracle to buy $300 billion worth of cloud computing from the database giant over five years. But the deal raised serious questions about how exactly OpenAI is going to find this money, as it currently expects to burn $115 billion through 2029.

A few weeks later, Stargate partners OpenAI and Nvidia announced that they had signed a “letter of intent” for a strategic partnership. The blockbuster agreement consisted of a $100 billion investment in OpenAI by Nvidia to build and deploy “at least 10 gigawatts” of AI data centers, filled with Nvidia’s next-gen Vera Rubin chips. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC that 10 gigawatts’ worth of computing power means “roughly 4 million, 5 million GPUs,” which he said was twice the amount that the company shipped last year. Nvidia’s $100 billion investment would be spread out in $10 billion payments, as each gigawatt of capacity was deployed. 

According to a report by Reuters, the unusual agreement gave Nvidia nonvoting shares in OpenAI, and OpenAI would then use that capital to pay Nvidia for its chips, raising concerns of a “circular deal,” which industry observers fear might be a harbinger of a massive AI bubble.

While the announcement did not specifically say that the deal was part of Stargate, Nvidia is the supplier of the AI and networking hardware for the project, and given the massive scale, it is sure to overlap with Stargate.

Power-hungry

OpenAI appears to be pulling in substantial revenue, but it’s also burning cash at an alarming rate. The Information reports that the company expects to end the year with $13 billion in revenue, while burning $8.5 billion in cash. The company has some extremely optimistic projections for growth, which it hopes will lead to AGI and hopefully a viable business model along the way. (OpenAI didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Even 10 gigawatts of computing power might not be enough for Altman, who wants much, much more than that. According to The Information, Altman has said internally that he wants 250 gigawatts by 2033 (which could cost up to $12.5 trillion).