AI·OpenAIOpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank expand Stargate with five new AI data centers, staging Texas media spectacle to counter criticsBy Sharon GoldmanBy Sharon GoldmanAI ReporterSharon GoldmanAI ReporterSharon Goldman is an AI reporter at Fortune and co- Eye on AI, Fortune’s flagship AI .
She has written digital and enterprise for over a decade.SEE FULL BIO Set in West Texas’s Big Country, the Stargate data center in Abilene became the stage for OpenAI and Oracle’s expansion announcement.In Abilene, Texas—in the heart of what locals call the Big Country, long defined by ranching and farming and now dotted with wind turbines—OpenAI and Oracle staged a carefully crafted media showcase on Tuesday, ushering reporters through an 800-acre data center complex packed with tens of thousands of state-of-the-art Nvidia GPUs.
The event was a victory lap of s, as CEO Sam Altman and Oracle’s new co-CEO Clay Magouryk pushed back against critics who have questioned the gress of their high-file and ambitious “Stargate” AI infrastructure ject.
At Tuesday’s event, the two companies, joined by Japan’s SoftBank, announced a big step forward for Stargate, touting an expansion of the Abilene site, as well as plans to build five massive, new data center complexes across the U.S.
over the next several years. Altogether, the initiative calls for hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in a ject of a mind-boggling scale.
In Abilene, alone a crew of 6,400 workers have already moved massive amounts of soil to flatten the hills, and laid down enough fiber optic cable to wrap the Earth 16 times.
“We cannot fall behind in the need to put the infrastructure together to make this revolution happen,” OpenAI’s Altman said during a Q&A with reporters.
“What you saw today is just a small fraction of what this site will eventually be, and this site is just a small fraction or building, and all of that will still not be enough to serve even the demand of ChatGPT,” he said, referring to OpenAI’s flagship AI duct.
The buildout attests to the towering expectations surrounding AI, as companies OpenAI, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta race to put in place the infrastructure necessary to power their large language models.
In July, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company would spend hundreds of billions of dollars building a network of data centers with names metheus and Hyperion to create “superintelligence.” Sharon Goldman Abilene, as well as the newly-announced data centers, are all part of the Stargate ject, a half-trillion-dollar joint initiative that OpenAI unveiled in January that aims to create a nationwide backbone for training its ever-larger AI models.
Stargate has been touted as a public–private partnership with the Trump administration—part of a bid to keep AI compute infrastructure in the U.S. and push jects past regulatory hurdles.
Among the guests and speakers at the Abilene event on Tuesday were Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Congressman Jodey Arrington, and local dignitaries including the mayor of Abilene and even a county judge.
Each of them emphasized Texas’ appeal as a hub for AI infrastructure. “Sam, Clay, welcome to Silicon Prairie,” Arrington said on stage, referring to the CEOs of OpenAI and Oracle.
The five new Stargate jects—in Texas, New Mexico, Ohio, and in an undisclosed Midwest location—will bring Stargate’s current pipeline to nearly 7 gigawatts and more than $400 billion in investment over the next three years.
In the data center world, “gigawatts” are shorthand for how much electricity a facility can draw—and therefore how much AI compute it can der.
A 1-gigawatt facility, for instance, requires enough substations, cooling, and transmission to sustain the power demand of nearly a million s.
Until recently, the data center facilities owned and operated by the largest cloud computing companies—the so-called hyperscalers—topped out at a few hundred megawatts.
But Microsoft and Meta have recently unveiled multi-gigawatt jects in Wisconsin and Louisiana.
And in a sign of the ever-increasing stakes in AI arms race, OpenAI and its partners mised Tuesday to reach a 10-gigawatt, $500 billion target by the end of 2025—ahead of schedule.
Oracle pointed out that the campus in Abilene, Texas is already up and running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), continues to gress rapidly, and is on track to vide OpenAI with the “world’s largest supercluster” when fully built.
Tuesday’s announcement included an expansion in Abilene on another site which will draw 600 megawatts – which could power roughly 450,000–600,000 s’ worth of electricity demand.
The new jects — in Texas, New Mexico, Ohio, and in an undisclosed Midwest location — will bring Stargate’s current pipeline to nearly 7 gigawatts and more than $400 billion in investment over the next three years.
That kind of capacity, which can power millions of s, is measured in power-plant terms: a typical hyperscale cloud campus runs a few hundred megawatts, while Microsoft and Meta have each announced multi-gigawatt jects in Wisconsin and Louisiana.
Three of the new sites — in Shackelford County, Texas; Doña Ana County, New Mexico; and an undisclosed Midwestern location — will be built with Oracle, expanding a July deal to develop up to 4.5 gigawatts of capacity worth more than $300 billion over five years.
Two others — in Lordstown, Ohio, and Milam County, Texas — will be developed with SoftBank, which has mised “fast-build” facilities that can scale quickly to multiple gigawatts.
The five sites emerged from a January site-selection contest that drew more than 300 posals from 30 states, underscoring how aggressively local governments courted the Stargate ject.
But Stargate’s expansion is certain to draw criticism on multiple fronts.
In Abilene and other communities hosting mega AI data centers, residents and activists worry the trade-offs: billions in tax abatements, the risk of gas-fired generation worsening local air quality, and the lihood that permanent jobs will number far fewer than the headlines suggest.
National energy analysts, meanwhile, warn that multi-gigawatt campuses could strain fragile power grids and lock in huge new demands for water and fossil fuels at a time when utilities are already struggling to keep up with AI’s growth.
For example, the site in Dona Ana County, New Mexico has garnered mixed reactions, with opponents raising concerns water usage and pollution, arguing these issues outweigh the economic benefits.
According to a county presentation, the ject will bring 800 permanent jobs and 2,500 construction jobs over three years.
Yesterday, Nvidia announced a letter of intent with OpenAI to deploy GPU-powered systems capable of drawing up to 10 gigawatts of electricity — the equivalent demand of 7 to 10 million s — backed by as much as $100 billion in investment.
Altman argued at the press Q&A that the most significant piece of Nvidia’s announcement wasn’t just the new sites but the financing model behind them.
Rather than paying billions for chips up front, OpenAI will be able to spread those costs over time as revenue scales. “We can kind of pay as we go, what’s on cloud services,” he said.
“the chips are a humongous percentage of the capex, and it’s harder for us to pay for that all up front, because our revenue comes in over the many months that customers run service among those chips.
So that really helps jects this.” But when it came to OpenAI’s energy demands, Senator Ted Cruz cast the stakes in both geopolitical and local terms.
“Message number one: America will beat China in the race for AI,” he said. Message number two? “Texas is ground zero for AI,” he added. “What do you want when you’re building AI data centers?
Number one, you want abundant, low-cost energy. Welcome to the great state of Texas.” Fortune Global Forum returns Oct. 26–27, 2025 in Riyadh.
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