OpenAI Teams Up With Oracle and SoftBank to Build 5 New Stargate Data Centres
Summary
OpenAI announced five new US data-centre projects under its Stargate initiative, developed with partners Oracle and SoftBank (via SB Energy). The additions push Stargate’s planned capacity to nearly 7 gigawatts — roughly the output of seven large nuclear reactors — and include sites in Texas, New Mexico, Ohio and an undisclosed Midwestern location.
OpenAI says the buildout and a 600 MW expansion at Abilene will create tens of thousands of onsite construction jobs and vastly increase GPU capacity for training and inference. Oracle is leading three of the new sites; two will be led by OpenAI and SB Energy. The Abilene flagship (primarily Oracle-owned) is already online in part, running Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and supporting OpenAI workloads.
The announcement sits alongside other major deals (notably a separate Nvidia partnership to deploy 10 GW and millions of GPUs) and comes amid debate over geopolitical competition with China, environmental impact, complex financing and whether raw scale will remain the top route to AI advantage.
Key Points
- Five new Stargate data-centre projects announced, bringing planned US capacity to nearly 7 GW.
- Locations include Shackelford County, Texas; Doña Ana County, New Mexico; an undisclosed Midwestern site (Oracle partners) plus Lordstown, Ohio and Milam County, Texas (OpenAI/SB Energy).
- Abilene flagship to be expanded by 600 MW; site will house 400,000+ GPUs and support ~1.4 GW when complete.
- OpenAI claims the projects will create more than 25,000 onsite construction jobs, though operational staffing needs are far smaller.
- Oracle is a major builder/host for Stargate halls; Nvidia announced a separate 10 GW partnership that includes up to $100bn in investment and millions of GPUs.
- OpenAI surveyed roughly 700 potential sites and reviewed 300 proposals across ~30 states for these projects.
- Critics warn about environmental trade-offs, complicated financing and whether sheer scale guarantees AI leadership—especially as efficient, lower-cost competitors emerge.
Why should I read this?
Short answer: because this is where the physical backbone of modern AI is being placed. If you care about who controls AI capacity, who wins the jobs and energy fights, or how geopolitics shapes tech — this affects all of that. The article explains the players, the locations, the scale (think gigawatts and hundreds of thousands of GPUs), and the big questions—environmental cost, accounting complexity and whether scale still wins. Quick, sharp and worth a skim if you want to understand where AI actually runs.
Source
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/openai-oracle-softbank-data-center-stargate-us/
