OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle Launch $500B JV For AI Infrastructure Investment At White House

President Donald Trump was joined by the heads of OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle at the White House on Tuesday to announce a massive private infrastructure investment focused on artificial intelligence. 

The three firms will form a joint venture called Stargate and commit an initial $100B to building the infrastructure needed to keep up with the rise of AI. The investment could grow to as much as $500B over the next four years.

Stargate’s first investment will be a data center venture in Texas, sources told CBS News. It will eventually add more partners and expand outside the state, they said. 

Trump described the venture during a press conference Tuesday as a “new American company that will invest $500B, at least, in AI infrastructure in the United States.” He said the investment would create more than 100,000 American jobs “almost immediately” and said the announcement was a “resounding declaration of confidence in America's potential under a new president.”

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Oracle’s Larry Ellison flanked the president as he announced the private funding.

In December, Son announced at a Mar-a-Lago press conference that SoftBank would spend at least $100B on AI and infrastructure over the next four years.

A potential data center megaproject named Stargate was first reported in April. At the time, the partnership was between Microsoft and OpenAI and sought to build one of the world’s largest data center campuses.

Ellison took the lectern after Trump to describe the details of the plan, saying that SoftBank and Oracle were already building 10 data centers in Abilene, Texas, each of which spanned 500K SF. Ten other data centers would soon break ground at the property, he said.  

The name of the project wasn’t given, but Oracle is already building a $3.4B data center campus in Abilene that could be Stargate’s first investment.  

He said that Microsoft and Nvidia had also been supportive of the project, in part through its investments in OpenAI.

Energy availability and grid infrastructure have become a key pinch point for the explosive growth in data center demand being driven by new AI tools, which require significantly more computing power to function compared to things like streaming video or browsing the web. 

Tech tenants are facing 10-year wait times to unlock new electricity from utilities as they struggle to keep up with demand. AI-driven computing is expected to double the data center sector’s global electricity consumption over the next five years, and new partnerships are being formed to tap additional power sources. 

In one of the largest such deals, Microsoft signed a 20-year agreement with Constellation Energy Corp. in September, under which the tech giant will contribute $1.6B toward the reopening of a nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island, the site of an infamous partial nuclear meltdown in 1979.

Social media giant Meta is also making energy deals, partnering with Exxon in December to build a 1.5-gigawatt natural gas plant to power a planned 4M SF data center campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana. 

Just days before leaving office, then-President Joe Biden signed an executive order directing the Department of Defense and Department of Energy to make federal sites available for clean energy production to help meet the power demands generated by the growth of AI.

During brief comments, Altman credited Trump with laying the groundwork to allow for today’s joint venture to be announced.

“We wouldn't be able to do this without you, Mr. President,” Altman said. “The fact that we get to do this in the United States is, I think, wonderful.”

For his part, SoftBank’s CEO described the joint venture as transformational, saying that AI was approaching the ability to solve problems that have dogged mankind.

Trump also said he wouldn't countermand an executive order by Biden that opens up federal lands for data center development.

UPDATE, JAN. 21, 5:58 P.M. ET: This story has been updated with comments from a press conference at the White House.