AI monster project Stargate is already under construction
Halls for hundreds of thousands of AI accelerators are being built near Abilene in Texas. There is cheap electricity from wind power and plenty of space.
Donald Trump announces Project Stargate in the presence of Larry Ellison (Oracle), Masayoshi Son (SoftBank) and Sam Altman (OpenAI).
(Image: YouTube/The White House)
On Tuesday, the newly elected US President Donald Trump announced the 500 billion US dollar Stargate project. It involves huge AI data centers under the leadership of SoftBank, OpenAI and Oracle with the participation of Nvidia and the MGX investment fund of the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates.
At least one Stargate data center is already under construction in a Texas field northwest of Abilene (link to Google Maps). The Houston-based company Lancium is operating its Clean Campus there with an initial connected load of 200 megawatts (MW).
Lots of wind power on site
The connected load of the Lancium Clean Campus Abilene is set to increase to 1 gigawatt (GW). Lancium is planning another Clean Campus near Fort Stockton. There are huge wind farms in the region that together can deliver more than this output.
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Texas is the US state with by far the largest wind energy capacity, with around 40 GW in operation. By comparison, Germany now has 63.5 GW onshore plus more than 8 GW offshore.
Lancium assures that the gigantic thirst for electricity of the data centers should not affect the local population's power supply. Line capacities are to be expanded if necessary. In other regions of the USA, such as Virginia near Dulles International Airport near Washington, capacities have long been in short supply.
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ARM Connection
Oracle was already named as a user of the Lancium Clean Campus in 2024. Billionaire Larry Ellison's company owns the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) division. OCI is currently building a data center with 131,072 Nvidia Blackwell accelerators. It is unclear whether this refers to the Abilene data center.
OCI is the most important customer of Ampere Computing, which develops server processors with ARM cores (Altra/AmpereOne). Oracle holds a 29 percent stake in Ampere.
The Chairman of Project Stargate is the CEO of SoftBank, Masayoshi Son, who has been investing in AI technology for years. SoftBank continues to hold the majority stake in the British company ARM and also bought the AI chip developer Graphcore in mid-2024. According to media reports, SoftBank also wants ARM to develop its own AI chips for data centers. According to speculation, ARM is considering the purchase of Ampere.
However, there are already many ARM cores in every Nvidia GB200. South of Texas, in Mexico, contract manufacturer Foxconn is currently building what it claims to be Nvidia's largest AI accelerator plant.
Former cryptominer on board
Lancium is cooperating with Crusoe Energy, a company in which billionaire Peter Thiel, among others, has invested, to build the Clean Campus Abilene. Crusoe Energy Systems used to focus primarily on data centers for cryptocurrencies; among other things, the company wanted to capture gas that was to be flared in order to generate electricity for Bitcoin mining (digital flare mitigation).
The construction company DPR Construction is responsible for building the data centers. In a project in San Antonio, DPR uses prefabricated elements to speed up construction.
Headwinds for Elon Musk & Microsoft
Speculation about Project Stargate emerged back in March 2024. At the time, Microsoft was considered a partner.
Microsoft is the largest investor in OpenAI. In the press release for Stargate, OpenAI also assures that it will continue to use computing power from Microsoft Azure. However, US media see Project Stargate as a setback for Microsoft.
Elon Musk, whose company xAI in Memphis, Tennessee, operates Colossus, one of the largest AI data centers in the USA to date, and is continuing to expand it, has recently cast doubt on the financing of Stargate.
(ciw)
