Project “Stargate”: Trump announces investments of “at least $500 billion” in artificial intelligence

The budget is dizzying. Donald Trump announced on Tuesday a new artificial intelligence project, called “Stargate”, including investments “of at least $500 billion” in AI infrastructure in the United States. Stargate brings together cloud specialist Oracle, Japanese investment giant SoftBank, and generative AI start-up OpenAI.

Donald Trump’s presentation was made at the White House, in the presence of the directors of these three companies. SoftBank boss Masayoshi Son said the joint venture would “start deploying $100 billion immediately,” with the goal of reaching a total of $500 over four years. This commitment is in addition to that already made by Masayoshi Son in mid-December, relating to 100 to 200 billion dollars of investments in the American technology sector within four years.

SoftBank’s participation in the “Stargate” project sparked market euphoria: around 00:45 GMT on Wednesday (1:45 a.m. in France), the Japanese group’s shares soared by 8.45% on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. According to a joint press release published Tuesday, in addition to SoftBank, Oracle and OpenAI, “Stargate” is financially supported by the MGX investment fund, backed by the United Arab Emirates.

Data centers under construction in Texas

The president and co-founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison, revealed that the project mainly focused on the construction of data hosting and processing centers, the famous “data centers”. “The first are already under construction in Texas”, near Abilene (north-east), said the manager. The development of the “cloud”, of AI in general and of generative AI in particular, requires immense data storage capacities, which has boosted the need for “data centers”.

Donald Trump assured that the creation of “Stargate” would create “almost immediately more than 100,000 jobs” in the United States. This new joint company “will build the physical and virtual infrastructures to support the next generation of AI,” said the American president. The partners want to bring together, around “Stargate”, companies from various sectors: data center infrastructure, energy supply, real estate, or even construction and equipment.

“We couldn’t have done this without you”

These investments “are money that normally would have gone to China or other countries, but more particularly to China,” said Donald Trump. Each in turn, the three bosses thanked Donald Trump. “We couldn’t have done this without you,” Sam Altman said.

OpenAI nevertheless took care to say that it “continued its work with Microsoft”, which is its 49% shareholder. In a report published in September, OpenAI pleaded with the US government for the creation of giant 5 gigawatt (GW) data centers, at an estimated cost of $100 billion.