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Project Stargate, announced by the White House earlier this week, has been heralded as a monumental AI “infrastructure” project that will totally transform America’s technological capacity. The CEOs of Oracle, OpenAI, and SoftBank traveled to D.C. this week to announce the supposed $500 billion effort and meet with Trump. Stargate will “re-industrialize” the U.S. and create a “strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies,” its backers claim. However, according to a recent report from the Financial Times, Stargate is little more than a development deal for OpenAI, with sources claiming it will “exclusively” serve the interests of the ChatGPT creator. At the same time, the sources say the project doesn’t yet have the money it needs to make its promises a reality.
Stargate is technically a new company, formed partially through funding from OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Arm, among others. The company’s aim is to build data centers and other “AI infrastructure” across the U.S. and, thus, build “infrastructure [that] will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world,” a press release on OpenAI’s website reads. However, while the circulating rhetoric claims Stargate will “benefit the whole world,” anonymous sources with knowledge of the deal reportedly told FT that Stargate will mostly benefit OpenAI’s business.
“The intent is not to become a data centre provider for the world, it’s for OpenAI,” said one of the anonymous sources interviewed by FT. Those same sources claimed that the project’s backers, while having made a big show at the White House earlier this week, haven’t worked out the details yet. The project “has not yet secured the funding it requires, will receive no government financing and will only serve OpenAI once completed,” according to statements made by sources interviewed by FT. “They haven’t figured out the structure, they haven’t figured out the financing, they don’t have the money committed,” one source told the outlet. “There’s a real intent to do this, but the details haven’t been fleshed out,” another person added. “People want to do splashy things in the first week of Trump being in office.”
While it’s unclear who these sources that spoke with FT are, it’s notable that Elon Musk—who is both a new White House employee and a high-profile foe of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—has been saying exactly the same thing. In a recent tweet, Musk claimed that Stargate doesn’t “actually have the money” and has repeatedly ridiculed the project.
Other reporting this week found that, despite the fact that the White House has claimed the project will “create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world,” Stargate has, so far, only committed to employing 57 people. That’s not a great look for a project whose ultimate end-goal is to create technologies that can automate labor and replace American workers, though I suppose it’s par for the course.
Gizmodo reached out to OpenAI for comment but did not hear back by time of publication.
The project’s significant ties to an autocratic regime in the Middle East have also raised eyebrows. Indeed, one of the larger known revenue sources will come from the United Arab Emirates. The Abu Dhabi state AI fund—known as MGX—is a founding partner of Stargate and reportedly plans to commit $7 billion to Trump’s initiative. By contrast, SoftBank and OpenAI plan to each contribute over $15 billion. MGX is part of a sovereign wealth fund overseen by Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan, the intelligence chief of the UAE. Nahyan has spent recent months meeting with top American tech executives—including Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Ruth Porat, the president of Google parent company Alphabet—to discuss AI development, Bloomberg reports.
When Altman was shockingly ousted from OpenAI in November 2023, one theory for why the CEO had been ejected had to do with his travels to the Middle East to raise billions for an AI-focused chip company. Altman’s discussions with the autocratic regime were controversial then and still are. The reason why Altman was ousted has never been publicly disclosed.
