OpenAI Opens Five New Data Centers in the US to Accelerate the Stargate Project

OpenAI announced that it will build five new data centers in the United States, which will be located in Texas, New Mexico, Ohio, and a region in the Midwest. This expansion will bring the total computing capacity of the Stargate project close to 7 gigawatts (GW). The Stargate project is a $500 billion generative AI infrastructure plan jointly launched by OpenAI, Oracle, Japan's SoftBank, and UAE investment company MGX. OpenAI will be responsible for operating the data centers, while Oracle will provide server infrastructure and leasing services, SoftBank will handle capital investment, and NVIDIA will supply a large number of chips for the project.

According to the plan, the Stargate project is expected to reach a total capacity of 10 GW by the end of 2028, and the addition of these five new data centers has accelerated the project's progress. Oracle will develop three of the new data centers, committing to provide 4.5 GW of computing power for the Stargate project, located in Shackelford County, Texas; Doña Ana County, New Mexico; and a location in the Midwest. At the same time, Oracle also plans to expand its existing Stargate flagship data center in Abilene, Texas, adding 600 MW of computing power. With this, its total contribution will exceed 5.5 GW, creating 25,000 on-site jobs and tens of thousands of other jobs in the United States.

OpenAI and SoftBank will jointly develop the other two new data centers, which will provide 1.5 GW of computing power within 18 months and have the potential to scale up to multiple gigawatts. They are located in Lordstown, Ohio, and Milan County, Texas, with the former already under construction.

To date, the Stargate project has received over $400 billion in investments, which will be used for new data centers, the Abilene data center, and various projects with cloud computing company CoreWeave. OpenAI also stated that more U.S. data centers will be announced in the future, which will exceed the initially promised $500 billion in total investment. In addition, the Stargate project also plans to build international data centers in countries such as Norway, the UK, Japan, the UAE, and India.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said when announcing the five new data centers: "For artificial intelligence to realize its potential, corresponding computing power must be established." He believes that strong computing power is key to ensuring that everyone can benefit from artificial intelligence and to drive future breakthroughs. Altman emphasized that if computing power is limited, choices must be made between different goals, but no one wants to make such choices, so infrastructure needs to be actively built. According to the goal, OpenAI hopes to generate 1 GW of new AI infrastructure per week in the coming years.

This week, NVIDIA committed to investing up to $100 billion in OpenAI, and OpenAI also plans to use as many as 5 million NVIDIA GPUs to deploy at least 10 GW of new computing infrastructure.

Key Points:

🌐 OpenAI will build five new data centers in the United States, and the total computing capacity of the Stargate project will reach nearly 7 GW.

💼 Oracle will be responsible for building three new data centers, and the Abilene data center will be expanded and add 600 MW of computing power.

🚀 OpenAI plans to increase 1 GW of AI infrastructure per week in the future to further advance AI technology.