OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle Announce a $500 Billion Plan to Build AI Data Centers in America

Standing beside President Trump at the White House, the companies said they would invest up to half a trillion dollars over four years in the computing infrastructure to run AI, starting with a campus in Texas. The scale of the number drew immediate skepticism.

At the White House yesterday, on his second day in office, President Trump appeared with Sam Altman of OpenAI, Masayoshi Son of SoftBank, and Larry Ellison of Oracle to announce a venture called Stargate. The companies said it would invest $100 billion immediately and up to $500 billion over four years to build data centers in the United States for running artificial intelligence, and that the first was already under construction in Abilene, Texas. They said it would create 100,000 jobs.

Half a trillion dollars is a number in the range of the entire Apollo space program in today's money, and the skepticism started at once. Elon Musk, now an adviser to the president and a rival of Altman's, posted that the companies "don't actually have the money," and that SoftBank had secured well under $10 billion. The companies did not fully rebut him. What is clear is that the money is not in hand; it is a commitment to raise and spend, over years, an amount nobody has spent on anything like this.

The reason for the scale is the belief, shared across the industry, that the path to more capable AI runs through more computing power, and that whoever builds the most of it wins. The reason for the White House ceremony is that the buildout has become a matter of national competition — with China, whose cheap new model was released the same week — and the new administration wants the factories, and the electricity to run them, built in America.

Whether Stargate reaches $500 billion or a tenth of it, the announcement marks a shift. The AI story has been about software. It is now also about real estate, power plants, and geopolitics — about pouring concrete.