OpenAI has announced The construction of five new data centers in the United States as part of Project Stargate. These facilities will be developed in collaboration with Oracle and Softbank, and will have a joint power of 7 GW, more or less the equivalent of what would generate seven large nuclear reactors.
Why is it important. We had just believed that The announcement of the colossal project It was really to crystallize, but eight months later this announcement confirms that there are certainly solid plans to try to carry it forward. It seemed not easy for the gigantic financing of $ 500,000 million in the next four years, but the pieces seem OpenAi ad.
Oracle as the main partner. Three of the new facilities will be developed in Oracle collaboration. They will be created by Shakelford County in Texas, in Doña Ana County in New Mexico, and in a third location still to be determined in the mid-west. The announcement is precisely the confirmation of the Agreement announced Between both companies in July. In this agreement there was talk of how both companies were going to create data centers with a joint capacity of 4.5 GW in addition to that both are already building in Abilene.
In 2026 the first will be ready. The most important data center of this collaboration is that it is already under construction in Abilene (Texas), which will be owned by Oracle and will have OpenAi as the main client. The project is being managed by the startup Crusoe, and It is expected that is completed in mid -2026. It will consist of eight large buildings, each with a capacity of 100 MW. One of those buildings is already completed and in total the center will consist with more than 400,000 GPUS and will have a joint capacity of 1.4 GW according to sources close to the project.
Is it better than not missing? Jonathan Koomey, a professor at the University of Berkeley in California, has studied the efficiency of data centers for years. In his opinionthese gigantic investments may not be enough to guarantee Openai’s success, especially when Depseek showed that much more efficient and affordable models can be valid alternatives. For Koomey, Openai’s bet – scarce big – may not go well, and will have to be fulfilled that the demand for computing that Altman foresees and his own is fulfilled.
Dizzy figures. If Openai manages to execute this project, it will cease to be a mere research laboratory to become a reference in the field of infrastructure, competing with traditional giants such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. That only the Abilene data center has a capacity of 1.4 GW is extraordinary, especially when Denmark’s average consumption was 4.38 GW (38.4 twh divided by the number of hours of the year, 8,760). This is: the OpenAI Data Center consumes almost a third of the average total electricity consumption throughout Denmark for 2024.
THE OTHER BIG TECH. The really surprising thing about this project is that traditional Big Tech are not involved in it, but companies that seem to ambition to enter that group … or create a new elite. So,
Stargate is, above all, a slogan. Although initially it was assumed that Stargate would be a new company, now managers close to the project indicate which is rather a kind of “umbrellas” under which all OpenAi data centers projects are encompassed, except those developed in collaboration with Microsoft.
There is still uncertainty. Despite this announcement, the challenges facing the project are still colossal. The chip supply chain, the development of energy solutions and cooling systems is fragile, and remains to be seen 1) if those data centers will be completed and enter into operation, and 2) if they will really be necessary. Sam Altman is especially obsessed with that idea, and In a recent post on your blog He talked about how the use of AI services will grow even more spectacularly in the coming months.
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