OpenAI said that the construction of Stargate I in Abilene is progressing and parts of the facility are now up and running
In sum – what to know:
4.5 GW added – OpenAI and Oracle will expand Stargate with another 4.5 GW, pushing total U.S. AI capacity over 5 GW.
100k+ jobs – The buildout supports over 100,000 jobs across construction, operations, and service industries.
Big‑vision build – The project forms part of a $500 billion, 10 GW US AI infrastructure pledge, with contributions from Oracle, SoftBank, Microsoft, and government agencies.
OpenAI and Oracle have announced plans to expand Stargate — OpenAI’s large-scale AI infrastructure project — with an additional 4.5 GW of data center capacity in the U.S., the former said in a release.
“Together with our Stargate I site in Abilene, Texas, this additional partnership with Oracle will bring us to over 5 gigawatts of Stargate AI data center capacity under development, which will run 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. We now expect to exceed our initial commitment thanks to strong momentum with partners including Oracle and SoftBank,” OpenAI said.
The company also noted that the expansion is expected to create over 100,000 jobs across construction, operations, manufacturing, and services, adding that this estimate includes direct full-time jobs needed to operate Stargate data centers, short-term construction roles, and indirect jobs like manufacturing and local service roles.
“Construction of Stargate I in Abilene is progressing and parts of the facility are now up and running. Oracle began delivering the first Nvidia GB200 racks last month and we recently began running early training and inference workloads, using this capacity to push the limits of OpenAI’s next-generation frontier research. The Stargate I site has already created thousands of jobs, with more expected as operations expand, including specialized roles for electricians, equipment operators, and technicians hailing from more than 20 states,” OpenAI said.
The company also highlighted that its partnership with Japanese company SoftBank is moving forward with strong momentum. “With SoftBank, we’re moving quickly on site assessments and reimagining how data centers are designed to power advanced AI. These efforts will result in more capable and reliable AI for those who use our tools,” OpenAi said.
“Over the past six months, growing interest in Stargate has helped shape and expand our vision for this effort. Stargate is OpenAI’s overarching AI infrastructure platform—encompassing ongoing data center partnerships with Oracle, SoftBank and CoreWeave and international investments in U.S. infrastructure through OpenAI for Countries. Microsoft will continue to provide cloud services for OpenAI, including through Stargate,” the company added.
At its core, the Stargate scheme plans to build a network of AI data centers across the US. The initiative aims to provide sufficient capacity to meet growing demand for AI across sectors including scientific research, healthcare, automation, defense, and finance.
OpenAI previously announced the launch of “OpenAI for Countries” as an initiative within the Stargate project. It has announced plans to offer formalized infrastructure partnerships with national governments, in coordination with the US administration, to help build local AI data center capacity.
Under this initiative, the company will partner with countries to help build in-country data center capacity. These secure data centers will help support the sovereignty of a country’s data, build new local industries, and make it easy to customize AI and leverage their data in a private and compliant way.
The AI boom is putting enormous pressure on existing data infrastructure. Large AI models require thousands of GPUs (graphics processing units), advanced cooling systems and huge amounts of electricity — especially for training. Many existing data centers simply can’t keep up with the scale or energy demands of modern AI.
Stargate aims to solve this by creating purpose-built infrastructure from the ground up, designed specifically for AI workloads.
