The Stargate Project announces $500 billion for AI infrastructure

The day after his inauguration, President Trump appeared at the White House with Sam Altman, Masayoshi Son and Larry Ellison to announce the Stargate Project: a joint venture intending to invest $500 billion over four years in AI data centres in the United States, beginning with $100 billion deployed immediately. SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and the Emirati fund MGX were named as equity partners, with Arm, Microsoft, Nvidia and Oracle as technology partners. The first site was already under construction in Abilene, Texas.

The figure was larger than the annual GDP of most countries and drew immediate scepticism about whether the capital existed. Elon Musk, then close to the administration, posted that SoftBank had “well under $10 billion secured.” OpenAI did not dispute that the money would be raised over time rather than held.

The announcement’s significance was as much political as financial. It reframed AI infrastructure as a matter of national strategic capacity, with the head of state as its promoter, and it came a day after Trump revoked Biden’s AI executive order. Where the previous administration’s frame had been safety and civil rights, the new one was speed and dominance.

The timing was uncomfortable. Stargate was announced the day after DeepSeek released R1, and the market rout that followed a week later turned directly on whether spending of this scale was necessary at all. Both propositions — that frontier AI requires historic capital expenditure, and that it can be done for far less — were argued from the same week’s events for the rest of the year.

Electricity became the binding constraint the announcement made visible, and datacentre power demand turned into a live political issue in several US states.