Reports emerge that Microsoft and OpenAI are planning a $100 billion 'Stargate' data centre

The Information reported that Microsoft and OpenAI were planning a US data centre project, internally referred to as “Stargate,” that could cost around $100 billion — more than three times what Microsoft had spent the previous year on capital expenditure for servers, buildings and other equipment across its entire business. The report, citing people familiar with the plans, said Microsoft would likely bear most of the financing, and described the facility as intended to house an AI supercomputer built for OpenAI’s training needs.

According to the report, the two companies had mapped out a five-phase progression of increasingly large supercomputers, with Stargate as the fifth and largest phase; at the time of reporting, Microsoft and OpenAI were said to be in the middle of the third phase, and working toward a smaller fourth-phase system targeted for roughly 2026. Stargate itself, according to the plans described, was not expected to be operational before 2028. The scale involved — reports elsewhere put the facility at several hundred acres and up to five gigawatts of power draw — would have made it among the largest data centres in the world at the time.

The report arrived as evidence that frontier AI development had become a capital-intensity problem as much as a research one: training runs and the infrastructure to support them were becoming the binding constraint on progress, ahead of algorithmic advances, and the sums involved were reaching a scale associated with national infrastructure projects rather than corporate IT budgets.

The reported plan predated OpenAI’s public “Stargate Project,” announced alongside President Trump in January 2025 as a joint venture with SoftBank and Oracle rather than Microsoft alone — a change in structure and partners from what this report described, though the name and the basic ambition to build a dedicated AI supercomputer at unprecedented scale carried through from the March 2024 plans to the eventual public project.