According to media reports citing people familiar with the matter, the data center project "Stargate" (Stargate) led by artificial intelligence company OpenAI and global technology investment institution SoftBank Group has difficulty in launching and has significantly scaled back its recent plans.
In January this year, U.S. President Trump announced at the White House that OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle would build infrastructure to support the development of AI in the United States, known as "Stargate." The initial investment in the project is US$100 billion, with plans to expand to US$500 billion over the next four years.
According to people familiar with the matter, SoftBank and OpenAI have differences on key terms of the cooperation, including location issues. As a result, the new company responsible for the project has not signed a formal agreement on any data center.
While the companies pledged to invest $100 billion "immediately" in their January announcement, the project has now set a more modest goal of building a small data center by the end of the year, possibly in Ohio.
The stagnation is a blow to Son’s AI ambitions. In the past ten years, he has spent more than 100 billion US dollars in an attempt to bet on the super unicorns of the AI era, but has repeatedly failed.
Earlier this year, SoftBank invested US$30 billion in OpenAI, setting a record for a single investment in a startup. To raise funds, SoftBank borrowed heavily and sold some assets. This investment is being promoted simultaneously with the Stargate project, and SoftBank intends to lock in the say in AI computing infrastructure.
However, Altman is obviously unwilling to wait. In order to reserve computing power for ChatGPT’s next-generation products, he has bypassed SoftBank and signed large data center orders with other operators. At a SoftBank event last week, the two said in a video that "the initial goal is to jointly build a 10-gigawatt data center," but industry insiders regarded this as a public relations gesture.
A joint statement from both parties stated that the project "is being promoted in multiple states to build AI infrastructure that serves the future of mankind on an ultra-large scale and at ultra-high speed."
According to people familiar with the matter, Altman's OpenAI recently reached a data center agreement with Oracle. Over the next three years, OpenAI will pay Oracle more than $30 billion to lease data centers with a total capacity of 4.5 gigawatts. Additionally, OpenAI has a smaller deal with CoreWeave.
People familiar with the matter said that despite the unfavorable start, Son still sent an optimistic signal to those around him, saying that he was "optimistic about OpenAI and hopes to invest more in the company."