Stargate - A Very Big Bet On AI Infrastructure

Uploaded on 2025-01-23 in TECHNOLOGY-Key Areas-Artificial Intelligence, NEWS-Cybersecurity News, FREE TO VIEW

The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States. It will begin by deploying $100 billion immediately.

This infrastructure is intended to secure US leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit.

The investors say that this project will not only support the re-industrialisation of the United States, but also provide a strategic capability to protect national security.

The initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility. Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI are the initial technology partners.

The build-out of new high-powered data centres is currently underway, starting in Texas, and potential sites across the US for more campuses are under consideration.

The strategic importance of the project is relevant to successsive US governments actions to deprive China of cutting edge AI semiconductor chips, and the Stargate project can be placed alongside the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which is set to build its high-permance chips in three factories currently under construction in Arizona.

As part of Stargate, Oracle, NVIDIA, and OpenAI will collaborate to build and operate this computing system. This builds on a deep collaboration between OpenAI and NVIDIA going back to 2016 and a newer partnership between OpenAI and Oracle.

This builds on the existing OpenAI partnership with Microsoft. OpenAI will continue to increase its consumption of Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure as OpenAI continues its work with Microsoft with this additional compute to train leading models and deliver great products and services.

The company will continue to build and develop AI, and in particular Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which is the representation of generalised human cognitive abilities in software so that, faced with an unfamiliar task, the AGI system could find a solution. The intention of an AGI system is to perform any task that a human being is capable of. The investors believe that this is a critical step that and will enable creative people to conceive how to use AI to 'elevate humanity'.

Notably absent from the ensemble of leading US technology firms engaged with Stargate are Mark Zuckerberg's Meta and Elon Musk.

Indeed, Musk has responded critically to the involvement of OpenAI, in which he was originally a shareholder, telling reporters,"They don’t actually have the money. SoftBank has well under $10B secured..." suggesting that $500billion could be insufficient to achieve the investors' ambitions.

APNews | OpenAI | CNBC | Sky News | @elonmusk

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