President Trump has announced the launch of Stargate, a joint venture that plans to invest $500 billion over the next four years to develop AI data centers and generate electricity for AI across the US.
“Immediately, Stargate will be building the physical and virtual infrastructure to power the next generation of advancements in AI,” Trump said in his address on Tuesday.
Stargate is being led by OpenAI and Softbank. OpenAI is overseeing its operations, while Softbank is managing the project’s finances. Oracle and MGX are its initial equity funders, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son will be its chairman. The funding partners will deploy $100 billion immediately, with the rest to flow in over the next four years.
The construction of Stargate’s first data center is already underway in Texas, with each center expected to be at least half a million square feet in size, Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison said after Trump made the initial announcement. 10 buildings are currently under construction, and more sites across the US are being evaluated for future development. The AI hardware will be built and operated by Oracle, NVIDIA, and OpenAI, with Arm and Microsoft joining them as “key initial technology partners.”
OpenAI believes Stargate will “secure American leadership in AI,” create hundreds of thousands of jobs, and help “protect the national security of America and its allies.”
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One of Stargate’s many AI applications will include attempts at early cancer diagnosis, according to Ellison. “Using AI to look at the blood test, you can find the cancers that are actually seriously threatening the person,” Ellison said. Beyond that, AI could be used to gene sequence a cancer tumor and design a vaccine in about 48 hours to cure an individual’s specific cancer.
But claims of using AI to ensure national security or cure cancer are sky-high promises that may or may not pan out. Right now, there are some major obstacles to using AI to identify cancer, such as the cost of data storage, the lack of 100% accuracy, a lack of training data, and other concerns. And while AI investments could help the US stay ahead in some sectors, advanced AI also poses some “catastrophic” risks to national security, according to a State Department-commissioned report released last year.
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About Jibin Joseph
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