Oracle to buy Nvidia GPUs for OpenAI for 40 billion dollars
The world's largest AI data center is to be built in Texas as "Stargate". Oracle is said to have ordered 400,000 Nvidia GPUs for it.
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The Stargate project is intended solely for OpenAI – The creators of ChatGPT and Dall-E, among others, want to build the world's largest AI data center near Abilene in the US state of Texas. The planned 1.2 gigawatts of power consumption are likely to be consumed primarily by 400,000 GB200 GPUs from Nvidia.
Oracle, one of the parties involved in the project, is to provide this many of these computing accelerators for Stargate, reports the Financial Times. The newspaper cites unnamed sources and has previously published unconfirmed reports on Stargate. Oracle is said to be financing the GPUs, equipping the data center and leasing the computing power exclusively to OpenAI. Other investors include Softbank, the Arab investment fund MGX and Nvidia itself. It is not clear from the report whether the 40 billion US dollars for the GPUs will be paid in full.
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Oracle could become the largest investor
With Stargate, OpenAI wants to make itself somewhat more independent of its largest investor to date, Microsoft. According to the Financial Times, the largest part of Microsoft's investment in OpenAI to date - 14 billion US dollars - has been in the form of payments (credits) for computing power at various data centers. By comparison, both Oracle and Softbank are said to have provided 18 billion each for Stargate to date, while MGX is said to have provided seven billion. The data center is to be operated by AI service provider Crusoe, as it recently announced once again. There is a joint venture with Blue Owl Capital for this purpose; together, these two companies want to raise 15 billion US dollars.
Stargate has been under construction since June 2024 and is scheduled for completion in mid-2026. The only known source of energy for the 1.2 gigawatts frequently mentioned by those involved is a gas-fired power plant located next to the data center, which is also already under construction.
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