OpenAI, Oracle Announce Expansion of Stargate

Oracle and OpenAI announced on July 22 an agreement to develop 4.5 gigawatts (GW) of additional Stargate data centre capacity in the United States. 

This marks the latest development in the $500 billion initiative to construct AI infrastructure across the United States, led by OpenAI and SoftBank in partnership with Oracle, MGX, Arm, Microsoft, and NVIDIA.

The agreement between OpenAI and Oracle, along with the Stargate I site that the two companies are developing in Abilene in Texas, will result in more than 5 GW of AI data centre capacity under construction, equipped with over 2 million chips. 

“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 the announcement. 

“We now expect to exceed our initial commitment thanks to strong momentum with partners including Oracle and SoftBank,” added the company. 

However, earlier reports indicated that OpenAI has encountered difficulties in building data centres with its other partner in the Stargate project, SoftBank. 

A report from The Wall Street Journal stated that the two companies have been at odds over several important aspects of the partnership, such as where to build the infrastructure. 

Thus, OpenAI and SoftBank aim to build only a small-scale data centre by the end of this year, likely in Ohio, according to the report. 

While it isn’t clear if OpenAI is intending to respond to the above reports, it said that, “Complementing this expansion with Oracle, our partnership with SoftBank is moving forward with strong momentum. Both are critical to meeting OpenAI’s continually expanding compute needs.”

“With SoftBank, we’re moving quickly on site assessments and reimagining how data centres are designed to power advanced AI,” added the company.