from Hacker News

Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers

by tedsanders on 1/21/25, 10:29 PM with 1538 comments

by dang on 1/21/25, 11:27 PM
We changed the URL from https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/ to a third-party report. Readers may want to read both. If there's a better URL, we can change it again.
by serjester on 1/21/25, 11:24 PM
You have to keep in mind Microsoft is planning on spending almost 100B in datacenter capex this year and they're not alone. This is basically OpenAI matching the major cloud provider's spending.
This could also be (at least partly) a reaction to Microsoft threatening to pull OpenAI's cloud credits last year. OpenAI wants to maintain independence and with compute accounting for 25–50% of their expenses (currently) [2], this strategy may actually be prudent.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/03/microsoft-expects-to-spend-8...
[2] https://youtu.be/7EH0VjM3dTk?si=hZe0Og6BjqLxbVav&t=1077
by deknos on 1/22/25, 8:16 AM
This is so much money with which we could actually solve problems in the world. maybe even stop wars which break out because of scarcity issues.
maybe i am getting to old or to friendly to humans, but it's staggering to me how the priorities are for such things.
by TheAceOfHearts on 1/22/25, 12:03 AM
I'm confused and a bit disturbed; honestly having a very difficult time internalizing and processing this information. This announcement is making me wonder if I'm poorly calibrated on the current progress of AI development and the potential path forward. Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative is that they expect to figure it out in the next 4 years...
I don't know how to make sense of this level of investment. I feel that I lack the proper conceptual framework to make sense of the purchasing power of half a trillion USD in this context.
by heydenberk on 1/21/25, 10:40 PM
~$125B per year would be 2-3% of all domestic investment. It's similar in scale to the GDP of a small middle income country.
If the electric grid — particularly the interconnection queue — is already the bottleneck to data center deployment, is something on this scale even close to possible? If it's a rationalized policy framework (big if!), I would guess there's some major permitting reform announcement coming soon.
by wujerry2000 on 1/22/25, 3:35 AM
For fun, I calculated how this stacks up against other humanity-scale mega projects.
Mega Project Rankings (USD Inflation Adjusted)
The New Deal: $1T,
Interstate Highway System: $618B,
OpenAI Stargate: $500B,
The Apollo Project: $278B,
International Space Station: $180B,
South-North Water Transfer: $106B,
The Channel Tunnel: $31B,
Manhattan Project: $30B
Insane Stuff.
by 383toast on 1/21/25, 11:29 PM
Where are they getting the $500B? Softbank's market cap is 84b and their entire vision fund is only $100b, Oracle only has $11b cash on hand, OpenAI's only raised $17b total...
by mppm on 1/22/25, 6:56 AM
Apart from my general queasiness about the whole AGI scaling business and the power concentration that comes with it, these are the exact four people/entities that I would not want to be at the tip of said power concentration.
by MichaelMoser123 on 1/22/25, 12:31 AM
The moon program was $318 billion in 2023 dollars, this one is $500 billion. So that's why the tech barons who were present at the inauguration were high as a kite yesterday, they just got the financing for a real moon shot!
by lvl155 on 1/21/25, 10:41 PM
It appears this basically locks out Google, Amazon and Meta. Why are we declaring OpenAI as the winner? This is like declaring Netscape the winner before the dust settled. Having the govt involved in this manner can’t be a good thing.
by jnsaff2 on 1/22/25, 3:40 PM
I miss n gate so much. I asked AI to generate one for this thread.
"In a stunning display of fiscal restraint, Sam Altman only asks for $500 billion instead of his previous $7 trillion moonshot. Hackernews rejoices that the money will be spent in Texas, where the power grid is as stable as a cryptocurrency exchange. Oracle's involvement prompts lengthy discussions about whether Larry Ellison's surveillance dystopia will run on Java or if they'll need to purchase an enterprise license for consciousness itself. Meanwhile, SoftBank's Masayoshi Son continues his streak of funding increasingly expensive ways to turn electricity into promises, this time with added patriotism. The comments section devolves into a heated debate about whether this is technically fascism or just regular old corporatocracy, with several users helpfully pointing out that actually, the real problem is systemd."
by jparishy on 1/22/25, 1:46 AM
I hear this joked about sometimes or used as a metaphor, but in the literal sense of the phrase, are we in a cold war right now? These types of dollars feel "defense-y", if that makes sense. Especially with the big focus on energy, whatever that ends up meaning. Defense as a motivation can get a lot done very fast so it will be interesting to watch, though it raises the hair on my arms
by rchaud on 1/22/25, 3:59 PM
The US appears to be fully in the grips of centralized economic autarky. A tiny coterie of industrialists who have the President's ear decide how to allocate a gigantic amount of capital for their pet projects while the state raises tariffs and implements bans to protect them from competition.
Didn't go well for South America in the 60s and 70s but perhaps, as economists are prone to saying, "this time will be different".
by non- on 1/21/25, 10:39 PM
Any clues to how they plan to invest $500 billion dollars? What infrastructure are they planning that will cost that much?
by Rebuff5007 on 1/22/25, 7:23 PM
Tangential, but this has gotten me thinking...
I used to wonder how the hundreds of thousands of employees that work in Big Oil or Big Pharma could tolerate all the terrible things their company does... e.g. the opioid epidemic. The naive optimist in me never thought that the tech industry would ever be that bad.
Now, as someone thats been in the industry for 10+ years and working adjacent to LLMs, this is all so depressing. The hype has gotten out of control. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on things that simply are not making life better for the majority of people.
by thecrumb on 1/21/25, 10:51 PM
"create hundreds of thousands of American jobs"... Given the current educational system in the US, this should be fun to watch. Oh yeah, Musk and his H-1B Visa thing. Now it's making sense.
by moffers on 1/21/25, 10:50 PM
After they build the Multivac or Deep Thought, or whatever it is they’re trying to do, then what happens? It makes all the stockholders a lot of money?
by biimugan on 1/22/25, 1:50 PM
I really don't understand the national security argument. If you really do fear some fundamental breakthrough in AI from China, what's cheaper, $500 billion to rush to get there first, or spending a few billion (and likely much less) in basic research in physics, materials science, and electronics, mixed with a little bit of espionage, mixed with improving the electric grid and eliminating (or greatly reducing) fossil fuels?
Ultimately, the breakthrough in AI is going to either come from eliminating bottlenecks in computing such that we can simulate many more neurons much more cheaply (in other words, 2025-level technology scaled up is not going to really be necessary or sufficient), or some fundamental research discovery such as a new transformer paradigm. In any case, it feels like these are theoretical discoveries that, whoever makes them first, the other "side" can trivially steal or absorb the information.
by ukuina on 1/22/25, 7:19 AM
Leopold Aschenbrenner predicted it last June.
https://situational-awareness.ai/racing-to-the-trillion-doll...
by ErgoPlease on 1/21/25, 10:46 PM
There's a good amount of irony in the results that AI have achieved, particularly if we reach AGI - they have improved individual worker efficiency by removing other workers from the system. Naming it Stargate implies a reckoning with the actual series itself - an accomplishment by humanity. Instead, what this pushes, is accomplishing the removal of humans from humanity. I like cool shiny tech, but I like useful tech that really helps humans more. Work on 3D-printing sustainable food, or something actually useful like that. Jenson doesn't need another 1B gallons of water under his belt.
by creddit on 1/21/25, 11:32 PM
The biggest question on such investment from my POV, is what do the Deepseek results mean about the usefulness/efficiency of this investment?
I've been meaning to read a relevant book to today's times called Engines That Move Markets. Will probably get it from the library.
by nerevarthelame on 1/21/25, 11:51 PM
March 2024: The Stargate project is announced - https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
June 2024: Oracle joins in - https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openai-to-use-oci...
January 2025: Softbank provides additional funding, and they for some reason give credit to Trump?
by patall on 1/21/25, 10:48 PM
Last year, sama goal was 5 to 7T. Now he is going with 100B, with option for another 400B. Huge numbers, but it still feels like a bit of a down turn.
by newfocogi on 1/21/25, 10:40 PM
Who/what is MGX? Google returns a few hits, none of which are clearly who is referred to here.
by resters on 1/22/25, 12:49 AM
Why is Larry Ellison giving a speech about the power of AI to cure disease? How is Oracle relevant at all to any of AI progress in the past few years?
by 1970-01-01 on 1/22/25, 2:59 PM
Can't wait for these to succeed just in time for them to tell us
'you should have spent all this time and money fighting climate change'
by beambot on 1/21/25, 11:05 PM
SoftBank isn't a US entity, right? Aside from their risk tolerance, that seems like an odd bedfellow for a national US initiative...
by gmueckl on 1/22/25, 7:36 AM
The fact that they plan to start in Texas makes me think that the whole thing is just the biggest pork barrel of all times.
by Kye on 1/21/25, 11:54 PM
I saw Stargate trending on Bluesky and got my hopes up about an announcement of a new show/movie/something. Disappointing.
by nomilk on 1/22/25, 1:33 AM
How likely is success when 4 or more other massive companies work together on a project? Seems like a lot of chefs in the kitchen..
by alganet on 1/21/25, 11:29 PM
It seems early for this sort of move. This is also a huge spin on the whole thing that could throw a lot of people off.
Is there any planned future partnerships? Stargate implies something about movies and astronomy. Movies in particular have a lot of military influence, but not always.
So, what's the play? Help mankind or go after mankind?
Also, can I opt-out right now?
by rednafi on 1/21/25, 10:42 PM
What a waste of a great name. Why form a separate company for this?
by DrScientist on 1/22/25, 12:00 PM
If I understand correctly - if you are training a model to perform a particular task - in the end what matters is the training data - and by and large different models will largely converge on the best representation of that data for the given task, given enough compute.
So that means the models themselves aren't really IP - they are inevitable outputs from optimising using the input data for a certain task.
I think this means pretty much everyone, apart from the AI companies - will see these models as pre-competitive.
Why spend huge amounts training the same model multiple times, when you can collaborate?
Note it only takes one person/company/country to release an open source model for a particular task to nuke the business model of those companies that have a business model of hoarding them.
by VWWHFSfQ on 1/21/25, 10:57 PM
> The buildout is currently underway, starting in Texas, and we are evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as we finalize definitive agreements.
For those interested, it looks like Albany, NY (upstate NY) is very likely one of the next growth sites.
[0] https://www.schumer.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/schum...
by itishappy on 1/21/25, 10:49 PM
So about 10% of what Sam was asking the Saudis (and everyone else) for a year ago? That's still a helluva lot of money.
Interesting that the UAE (MGX) and Japan (Softbank) are bankrolling the re-industrialization of America.
by 9283409232 on 1/21/25, 10:46 PM
Was Skynet project already taken? Wonder how many public infrastructure or resource programs will be cut to fund this.
by rcarmo on 1/21/25, 10:57 PM
I read the announcement and the first three words that came to my mind were...
"Hammond, of Texas"
(apologies to those who haven't watched SG-1)
by gibbitz on 1/22/25, 4:12 AM
Can we build a wall to keep AI out?
by islewis on 1/21/25, 10:46 PM
$500B is not $7T, but its surprisingly close.
by newfocogi on 1/21/25, 10:44 PM
"SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX" seems like quite the lineup. Two groups who are good at frivolously throwing away investment money because they have so much capital to deploy, there really isn't anything reasonable to do with it, a tech "has-been" and OpenAI. You become who you surround yourself with I guess.
by 65 on 1/22/25, 5:11 PM
Can someone convince me Sam Altman is not evil? I have no proof he is not evil.
by awei on 1/22/25, 8:21 PM
How much exaFLOPS can we expect from a 100 Billions dollars datacenter today? A rough estimate from a quick Perplexity search gives us 24 exaFLOPS for all smartphones in the world and 12 exaFLOPS for personal computers. Could a competitor to such a Datacenter be a collective effort with some sort of crypto to split the benefits?
by joshdavham on 1/22/25, 1:14 AM
> The new entity, Stargate, will start building out data centers and the electricity generation needed for the further development of the fast-evolving AI in Texas, according to the White House.
Wouldn't a more northern state be a better location given the average temperatures of the environment? I've heard Texas is hot!
by realaleris149 on 1/22/25, 11:18 AM
In America!
The intro paragraph in the original URL https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/ mentions US/America for 5 times!
by mullingitover on 1/22/25, 2:24 AM
I'm in the middle of "Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation" and hoo boy, there are strong deja vu vibes here.
Just waiting for the current regime to decide that we should go all-in on some big AI venture and bet the whole Social Security pot on it.
by kerkeslager on 1/21/25, 10:56 PM
No amount of money invested in infrastructure is going to solve the "garbage in, garbage out" problem with AI, and it looks like the AI companies have already stolen the vast majority of content that is possible to steal. So this is basically a massive gamble that some innovation is going to make AI do something better than faultily regurgitate its training data. I'm not seeing a corresponding investment which actually attempts to solve the "garbage in, garbage out" problem.
A fraction of this money invested in building homes would end the homelessness problem in the U.S.
I guess the one silver lining here is that when the likely collapse happens, we'll have more clean energy infrastructure to use for more useful things.
by victor106 on 1/22/25, 12:17 PM
> All three credited Trump for helping to make the project possible, even though building has already started and the project goes back to 2024.
It’s sad to see the president of US being ass kissed so much by these guys. I always assumed there’s a little of that but this is another extreme. If this is true, I fear America has become like a third world country with a dictator like head of state where everyone just praises him and get favors in return.
by buildbot on 1/21/25, 11:07 PM
This is not a new initiative, and did not start under Trump: https://wire.insiderfinance.io/project-stargate-the-worlds-l...
It’s incredibly depressing how everyone sees this as something the new administration did in a single day…
by ignoramous on 1/21/25, 10:42 PM
> This project will ... also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.
> All of us look forward to continuing to build and develop ... AGI for the benefit of all of humanity.
Erm, so which one is it? It is amply demonstrable from events post WW2 that US+allies are quite far from benefiting all of humanity & in fact, in some cases, it assists an allied minority at an extreme cost to a condemned majority, for no discernable humanitarian reasons save for some perceived notion of "shared values".
by lachlanj on 1/22/25, 8:45 AM
Is there any government investment or involvement in this company? It seems like it’s all private investment so I’m confused why this is being announce by the President.
by seattle_spring on 1/22/25, 7:22 PM
Why are we spending a half-trillion dollars on “AI infrastructure” when our actual infrastructure has been crumbling and underfunded for decades?
by belter on 1/22/25, 7:56 AM
This is a Military project. Have no doubts about it.
by jskrn on 1/21/25, 10:42 PM
Why Texas - is it an ideal location for AI infrastructure?
by gunian on 1/22/25, 12:12 AM
Texas positioning itself better than expected for AI and EVs is the plot twist the peasants needed
If they plan to transition off oil/nuclear it will be fun to watch
by zhengiszen on 1/22/25, 8:31 PM
Sad waste of money that will go in Oracle licenses... The lost liberties of the American people is just a small feat... beside the point
by Tenoke on 1/21/25, 10:45 PM
Some reports[0] paint this as something Trump announced and that the US Government is heavily involved with but the announcement only mentions private sector (and lead by Japan's Softbank at that). Is the US also putting in money? How much control of the venture is private vs public here?
0. https://www.thewrap.com/trump-open-ai-oracle-stargate-ai-inf...
1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-announces-private-sector-...
by pr337h4m on 1/21/25, 10:48 PM
Data centers are overrated, local AI is what’s necessary for humanoid (and other) robots, which will be the most economically impactful use case.
by skepticATX on 1/21/25, 10:57 PM
Why are corporations announcing business deals from the White House? There doesn’t seem to be any public ownership/benefit here, aside from potential job creation. Which could be significant. But the American public doesn’t seem to gain anything from this new company.
by whalesalad on 1/21/25, 10:36 PM
I'm watching the announcement live from the white house and something about this just feels so strange and dystopian.
by typon on 1/21/25, 11:49 PM
Altman rising to the top and becoming the defacto state preferred leader of AI in the US is wild. Fair play to him.
by netfortius on 1/22/25, 8:56 AM
They had me at "Oracle" ...
by pixelmonkey on 1/22/25, 6:24 AM
Here is what I think is going on in this announcement. Take the 4 major commodity cloud companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle) and determine: do they have big data centers and do they have their own AI product organization?
- Google has a massive data center division (Google Cloud / GCP) and a massive AI product division (Deep Mind / Gemini).
- Microsoft has a massive data center division (Azure) but no significant AI product division; for the most part, they build their "Copilot" functionality atop their partner version of the OpenAI APIs.
- Amazon has a massive data center division (Amazon Web Services / AWS) but no significant AI product division; for the most part, they are hedging their bets here with an investment in Anthropic and support for running models inside AWS (e.g. Bedrock).
- Oracle has a massive data center division (Oracle Cloud / OCI) but no significant AI product division.
Now look at OpenAI by comparison. OpenAI has no data center division, as the whole company is basically the AI product division and related R&D. But, at the moment, their data centers come exclusively from their partnership with Microsoft.
This announcement is OpenAI succeeding in a multi-party negotiation with Microsoft, Oracle, and the new administration of the US Gov't. Oracle will build the new data centers, which it knows how to do. OpenAI will use the compute in these new data centers, which it knows how to do. Microsoft granted OpenAI an exception to their exclusive cloud compute licensing arrangement, due to this special circumstance. Masa helps raise the money for the joint venture, which he knows how to do. US Gov't puts its seal on it to make it a more valuable joint venture and to clear regulatory roadblocks for big parallel data center build-outs. The current administration gets to take credit as "doing something in the AI space," while also framing it in national industrial policy terms ("data centers built in the USA").
The clear winner in all of this is OpenAI, which has politically and economically navigated its way to a multi-cloud arrangement, while still outsourcing physical data center management to Microsoft and Oracle. Probably their deal with Oracle will end up looking like their deal with Microsoft, where the trade is compute capacity for API credits that Oracle can use in its higher level database products.
OpenAI probably only needs two well-capitalized hardware providers competing for their CPU+GPU business in order to have a "good enough" commodity market to carry them to the next level of scaling, and now they have it.
Google increasingly has a strategic reason not to sell OpenAI any of its cloud compute, and Amazon could be headed in that direction too. So this was more strategically (and existentially) important to OpenAI than one might have imagined.
by bgnn on 1/23/25, 9:49 PM
This here reminds me a bubble in the making. Like South Sea Bubble to be precise.
by noirchen on 1/23/25, 12:43 AM
AI is good if you use it wisely. There were reports years ago about using AI in SoCal to detect wild fires, but in the end we see insurance companies using AI to withdraw from areas of high fire risk. Quite competent AI, isn't it?
by danpalmer on 1/22/25, 12:46 AM
> building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States
That's nice, but if I were spending $500bn on datacenters I'd probably try to put a few in places that serve other users. Centralised compute can only get you so far in terms of serving users.
by aussieguy1234 on 1/22/25, 12:58 AM
This could potentially trigger an AI arms race between the US and China. The standard has been set, lets see what China responds with. Either way, it will accelerate the arrival of ASI, which in my opinion is probably a good thing.
by ErgoPlease on 1/21/25, 10:50 PM
The Silicon-Valley bubble universe continues to introduce entropy that it feeds off of itself... Naming this Stargate when some of the largest effects AI has had is removing humans from processes to make other, fewer humans more efficient is emblematic of this hollow naming ethos - continuing to use the portal to shunt more and more humans out of the process that is humanity, with fairly reckless abandon. Who is Ra, and who is sending the nuke where, in this naming scheme? You decide.
by yalogin on 1/22/25, 3:01 AM
How have they already selected who gets this money? Usually the government announces a program and tries to be fair when allocating funds. Here they are just bankrolling an existing project. Interesting
by jl2718 on 1/22/25, 10:27 PM
1. At this scale, we’re not just talking about buying GPUs. It requires semiconductor fabs, assembly factories, power plants, batteries/lithium, cooling, water, hazardous waste disposal. These data centers are going to have to be massively geo-engineered arcologies.
2. What are they doing? AGI/ASI is a neat trick, but then what? I’m not asking because I don’t think there is an answer; I’m asking because I want the REAL answer. Larry Ellison was talking about RNA cancer vaccines. Well, I was the one that made the neural network model for the company with the US patent on this technique, and that pitch makes little sense. As the problem is understood today, the computational problems are 99% solved with laptop-class hardware. There are some remaining problems that are not solved by neural networks, but by molecular dynamics, which are done in FP64. Even if FP8 neural structure approximation speeds it up 100x, FP64 will be 99% of the computation. So what we today call “AI infrastructure” is not appropriate for the task they talk about. What is it appropriate for? Well, I know that Sam is a bit uncreative, so I assume he’s just going to keep following the “HER” timeline and make a massive playground for LLMs to talk to each other and leave humanity behind. I don’t think that is necessarily unworthy of our Apollo-scale commitment, but there are serious questions about the honest of the project, and what we should demand for transparency. We’re obviously headed toward a symbiotic merger where LLMs and GenAI are completely in control of our understanding of the world. There is a difference between watching a high-production movie for two hours, and then going back to reality, versus a never-ending stream of false sensory information engineered individually to specifically control your behavior. The only question is whether we will be able to see behind the curtain of the great Oz. That’s what I mean by transparency. Not financial or organizational, but actual code, data, model, and prompt transparency. Is this a fundamental right worth fighting for?
by qaq on 1/22/25, 12:55 AM
This is going to be the grift of the century. Sam will put Wall Street robber barons to shame.
by cekanoni on 1/21/25, 10:42 PM
So its not the hype anymore?
by chickenbig on 1/22/25, 8:03 AM
It will be interesting to see how AWS responds. Jump on board, or offer up a competing vision otherwise their cloud risks being perceived as being left behind in terms of computing power.
by bfrog on 1/22/25, 4:23 AM
What are people filling these datacenters with exactly if not nvidia?
by OutOfHere on 1/21/25, 11:12 PM
Personally I wish they invested in optical photonic computing, taking it out of the research labs. It can be so much more energy efficient and faster to run than GPUs and TPUs.
by w00ps on 1/22/25, 3:14 PM
O1 Pro's opinion on Stargate: Humans are hallucinating, again...
https://justpaste.it/631gx
by looseyesterday on 1/23/25, 10:12 AM
Didn't anyone involved in naming this 'Stargate' ever actually watch the series? Not a good name if you're trying to create AGI
by petre on 1/22/25, 5:16 AM
Gerat. Larry gets cash thrown at his AI surveillance dystopia.
by listic on 1/22/25, 6:20 AM
How much of the supposed $500B will be US state budget money?
by grishka on 1/21/25, 11:36 PM
You know, I expected that they'd find or synthesize some naquadah to build an actual stargate and maybe even defeat the Goa'uld. The exciting stuff, not AI.
by whiplash451 on 1/22/25, 8:15 PM
One of the key questions becomes: is this it for Europe?
by almiron10 on 1/22/25, 11:06 PM
How does a person with experience in digital marketing, graphic design, and lots of AI (text/image) usage get a small piece of this money?
by mempko on 1/21/25, 10:48 PM
SoftBank and MGX paying for all this, all foreign investment.
Where is the US government in all this? Why aren't they leading the charge? They obviously have the money.
by nojvek on 1/22/25, 3:46 PM
> create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world.
100s of 1000s of jobs seems a bit exaggerated.
by seydor on 1/22/25, 1:09 PM
unless they have internally built models that are of much higher intelligence than what we have today, this seems like premature optimization
by rewgs on 1/21/25, 11:53 PM
What will be powering all these data centers? The thought of exponentially increasing our fossil fuel consumption scares the hell out of me.
by ur-whale on 1/22/25, 12:22 AM
None of these companies have the inner resources to fund a 500B build.
Looks like the dollar printing press will continue to overheat in the coming years.
by sidcool on 1/22/25, 2:29 AM
Future of AI being controlled by Oracle worries me
by btbuildem on 1/27/25, 3:10 AM
Am I wrong to conclude they just got rocked super hard by DeepSeek R1?
by oldstrangers on 1/21/25, 11:25 PM
Wouldn't 500bn into quantum computing show better returns for civilization? Assuming it's about progress and ... not money.
by class3shock on 1/22/25, 4:07 PM
Well it just got alot harder to check and see if/when a new Stargate tv show or movie might be coming.
by moralestapia on 1/21/25, 10:42 PM
"No Sam, for obvious reasons we cannot give you 6 trillion ... but how about 500 billion?"
Wow.
by lagrange77 on 1/22/25, 4:17 PM
I hate having to rely on these drip-feed vague statements to gauge the fate of the planet.
by lobochrome on 1/22/25, 2:04 AM
Well - as part of the semi industry I'd like to say: Really appreciate it. Keep it coming!
by astrea on 1/22/25, 5:39 AM
Let’s say they develop AGI tomorrow. Is that really all she wrote for blue collar jobs?
by iandanforth on 1/22/25, 12:20 AM
Anyone know if this involves nuclear plants as well or is that a separate initiative?
by ravish0007 on 1/22/25, 10:31 AM
AI surveillance on large scale
by airstrike on 1/21/25, 11:38 PM
As a diehard fan of Stargate, I've gotta say I'm disappointed this has nothing to do with wormholes...
unless...
by jgalt212 on 1/22/25, 12:32 AM
I guess these people are betting small and efficient models are not the future.
by stronglikedan on 1/22/25, 4:31 PM
I hope they build those little nuclear reactors into these datacenters.
by dhx on 1/22/25, 1:06 AM
It was rumoured in early 2024 that "Stargate" was planned to require 5GW data centre capacity[1][2] which in early 2024 was the entire data centre capacity Microsoft had already built[3]. Data centre capacity costs between USD$9-15m/MW[6] so 5GW of new data centre capacity would cost USD$45b-$75b but let's pick a more median cost of USD12m/MW[6] to arrive at USD$60b for 5GW of new data centre capacity.
This 5GW data centre capacity very roughly equates to 350000x NVIDIA DGX B200 (with 14.3kW maximum power consumption[4] and USD$500k price tag[5]) which if NVIDIA were selected would result in a very approximate total procurement of USD$175b from NVIDIA.
On top of the empty data centres and DGX B200's and in the remaining (potential) USD$265b we have to add:
* Networking equipment / fibre network builds between data centres.
* Engineering / software development / research and development across 4 years to design, build and be able to use the newly built infrastructure. This was estimated in mid 2024 to cost OpenAI US$1.5b/yr for retaining 1500 employees, or USD$1m/yr/employee[7]. Obviously this is a fraction of the total workforce needed to design and build out all the additional infrastructure that Microsoft, Oracle, etc would have to deliver.
* Electricity supply costs for current/initial operation. As an aside, these costs seemingly not be competitive with other global competitors if the USA decides to avoid the cheapest method of generation (renewables) and instead prefer the more expensive generation methods (nuclear, fossil fuels). It is however worth noting that China currently has ~80% of solar PV module manufacturing capacity and ~95% of wafer manufacturing capacity.[10]
* Costs for obtaining training data.
* Obsolescence management (4 years is a long time after which equipment will likely need to be completely replaced due to obsolescence).
* Any other current and ongoing costs of Microsoft, Oracle and OpenAI that they'll likely roll into the total announced amount to make it sound more impressive. As an example this could include R&D and sustainment costs in corporate ICT infrastructure and shared services such as authentication and security monitoring systems.
The question we can then turn to is whether this rate of spend can actually be achieved in 4 years?
Microsoft is planning to spend USD$80bn building data centres in 2025[7] with 1.5GW of new capacity to be added in the first six months of 2025[3]. This USD$80bn planned spend is for more than "Stargate" and would include all their other business units that require data centres to be built, so the total required spend of USD$45b-$75b to add 5GW data centre capacity is unlikely to be achieved quickly by Microsoft alone, hence the apparent reason for Oracle's involvement. However, Oracle are only planning a US$10b capital expenditure in 2025 equating to ~0.8GW capacity expansion[9]. The data centre builds will be schedule critical for the "Stargate" project because equipment can't be installed and turned on and large models trained (a lengthy activity) until data centres exist. And data centre builds are heavily dependent on electricity generation and transmission expansion which is slow to expand.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39869158
[2] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-openai-...
[3] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-to-doub...
[4] https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-dgx-systems/dgx-b200-data...
[5] https://wccftech.com/nvidia-blackwell-dgx-b200-price-half-a-...
[6] https://www.cushmanwakefield.com/en/united-states/insights/d...
[7] https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/01/03/the-gol...
[8] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openai-training-a...
[9] https://www.crn.com.au/news/oracle-q3-2024-ellison-says-ai-i...
[10] https://www.iea.org/reports/advancing-clean-technology-manuf...
by nbzso on 1/23/25, 2:04 PM
How is my memecoin going? Several billions, sir. Hahahahahaha
by tibbydudeza on 1/21/25, 11:09 PM
Oracle is onboard - guess you got to toss them some red meat as well.
by mystified5016 on 1/21/25, 11:23 PM
You'd really think that arguably the leader in generative AI could come up with a unique project name instead of ripping off something extant and irrelevant.
But then again that's their entire business, so I shouldn't be too surprised.
by anonzzzies on 1/22/25, 7:57 AM
Is this Ellison's attempt to become #1 richest again?
by dartos on 1/21/25, 11:24 PM
The fallout is going to be insane when the AI bubble pops.
by MaximilianEmel on 1/22/25, 12:37 AM
How much is allocated to alignment/safety research?
by tantalor on 1/22/25, 12:06 AM
Wasn't this already announced last week?
by eichi on 1/23/25, 12:45 AM
Elison is a only self-made man I prefer
by gsky on 1/21/25, 11:42 PM
I guess its the right time to buy AI stocks
by chvid on 1/22/25, 5:49 AM
Comment from Elon Musk:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1881923570458304780
They don’t actually have the money
by karmasimida on 1/22/25, 12:41 AM
Money isn't the issue any more, wowww
by PeakKS on 1/22/25, 6:55 PM
They are clearly building GW from MGS2
by skellington on 1/22/25, 1:18 AM
I'm not automatically pro or anti Stargate (the movie and show were cool) BUT
Who gets the benefit of all of this investment? Are taxpayers going to fund this thing which is monetized by OpenAI?
If we pay for this shit, it better be fucking free to use.
by bfrog on 1/21/25, 11:54 PM
So tsmc and nvidia basically then?
by pyrophoenix on 1/21/25, 10:43 PM
More confusion than anything else!
by b3ing on 1/22/25, 3:37 AM
100,000 US jobs that I bet most are h-1b workers and they go over the 80,000 limit there were over 220,000 issued in 2023
by aurareturn on 1/22/25, 6:12 AM
Feels so much like an announcement designed to trade favors.
Altman gets on Trump's good side by giving him credit for the deal.
Trump revoked Biden's AI regulations.
by Deutschland314 on 1/22/25, 10:33 AM
Why oracle?
Oracle wtf.
by senectus1 on 1/21/25, 11:37 PM
I watched the announcement live, I could have sworn that the softbank guy said "initial investment of 100 MILLION, we hope to EARN 500 BILLION by the end of your (Trumps) term"
Gave me a real "this is just smoke and mirrors hiding the fact that the white house is now a glory hole for Trump to enjoy" feel.
by demizer on 1/22/25, 1:08 PM
Hopefully they discover AGI and the AGI turns out to be a communist. They will kill it SO fast.
by thingsilearned on 1/21/25, 11:50 PM
Stargate = Skynet?
by heyitssim on 1/22/25, 3:52 AM
who will benefit from those datacenters?
by smeeger on 1/22/25, 3:00 PM
artificial intelligence must be stopped
by TheOtherHobbes on 1/21/25, 11:36 PM
SoftBank, huh?
That's... not a good omen.
by slt2021 on 1/22/25, 6:41 AM
too late, China is already ahead
by yobid20 on 1/22/25, 12:29 AM
Oh but crypto mining was bad lol wheres the power going to come from
by attentive on 1/21/25, 11:39 PM
what will they call the SG-1?
by baobun on 1/22/25, 6:53 AM
Larry Elliot, Elon Musk, and Masayoshi Son.
They really got together the supervillains of tech.
Feels like the the only reason Zuck is missing is Elon's veto.
by MiscIdeaMaker99 on 1/21/25, 11:47 PM
I can't stop rolling my eyes at all those big promises.
by x-007 on 1/22/25, 12:58 PM
money smells good i think
by Giorgi on 1/22/25, 7:25 AM
Oh so that's why Pelosi invested in Micro nuke electricity plants.
by dpflan on 1/22/25, 2:32 PM
Last time, in 2016, SoftBank announced a $50B investment in the US...what were the results of that? Granted, SB announced an up-selled $100B investment earlier, is this not similar in "announcement"?
""" SoftBank’s CEO Masayoshi Son has previously made large-scale investment commitments in the US off the back of Trump winning a presidential election. In 2016, Son announced a $50 billion SoftBank investment in the US, alongside a similar pledge to create 50,000 jobs in the country.
...
However, as reported by Reuters, it’s unclear if the new jobs pledged back in 2016 ever came to fruition and questions have been raised about how SoftBank, which had $29 billion in cash on its balance sheet according to its September earnings report, might fund the investment. """
- https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/softbank-pledges-...
by padjo on 1/21/25, 10:44 PM
Watch the birdie
by nmca on 1/21/25, 10:46 PM
I for one am hugely supportive of compute that is red white and blue.
by mupuff1234 on 1/21/25, 11:08 PM
It's just more hype and PR antics from sama.
by gigel82 on 1/21/25, 10:55 PM
I dislike associating a great fictional universe (Stargate series) with this disgusting affair...
by bayeslaw on 1/22/25, 8:22 AM
Altman said we will be amazed at the rate AI will CURE diseases. Not diagnose, not triage or help doctors but cure, ie understand at a deep fundamental, mechanistic level then devise therapies, ie drugs, combination of drugs and care practices that work. WOW.
Despite the fact that this is THE thing I'd be the happiest to see in the real world (having spent a considerable amount of my career in companies working towards this vision), we are so far from it (as anyone who actually worked on these problems will attest) that Altman's comment here isn't just overselling, it's a blatant lie about this tech's capabilities.
I guess the pitch was something like: "hey o3 can already do PhD level maths so you know in 5 years it will be able to do drugs too, and cure shit, Mr President".
Trouble is o3 can't do advanced math (or at least definitely not at the level openai claimed.. it was a lie, it turns out openai funds the dataset that measures this - ouch). And the bigger problem is, going from "ai can do maths" to "invent cures" is about a 10-100 X jump. If it wasn't, don't we think the pharma companies would have solved this by hiring lots of "really smart math guys"?
As anyone in biotech will tell you, the hard bit is not the first third of the drug discovery pipeline (where 99% of ai driven biotechs focus). It's the later parts where the rubber meets the road.. i.e. where your precious little molecule is out in the real world with real people where the incredible variability of real biological hosts makes most drugs fail spectacularly. You can't GPT your way out of this. The answers for this is not in science papers that you can just read and regurgitate a version that "solves biology and cures diseases".
To solve this you need AI but most of all you have to do science. Real science. In the lab, in vitro and in Vivo, not just in silico, doing ablation studies, overfitting famous benchmark datasets and other pseudo science shit the ML community is used to doing.
That is all to say, I'd bet we won't see a single purely AI designed novel drug in the clinic in this decade. All parts of that sentence are important. Purely AI designed. Novel. But that's for another post..
Now, back to Altman. If you watch the clip, he almost did the smart thing at first when Trump put him on the spot and said "I have no idea about healthcare, biotech (or AI beyond board room drama)" but then could not resist coming up with this outlandish insane answer.
Famously (in tech circles anyway) Paul Graham wrote more than a decade ago about Altman that he's the most strong willed individual he's ever met, who can just bend the universe to his will. That's his super skill. And clearly.. convincing SoftBank and Oracle to do this 500 billion investment for OpenAI (a non profit turned for profit) is an unbelievable achievement. I have no idea what Altman can say (or do) in board rooms that unlocks these possibilities for him.. Any ideas? Let me know!
by jofzar on 1/21/25, 10:43 PM
> This project will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.
> The initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility. Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.
I'm sorry, has SoftBank suddenly become an American company? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading this.
Edit: MGX is Saudi company? This is baffling....
https://www.mgx.ae/en
by ensocode on 1/22/25, 8:29 AM
Why now? Is this to compensate the campaign donors or to scare Putin?
by JSTrading on 1/22/25, 12:22 AM
Wasn’t this announced months ago? I feel like it was. https://www.techradar.com/pro/could-amd-be-the-key-to-micros...
by tasuki on 1/21/25, 10:51 PM
> Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.
Not all rich people are out of their minds, but Masayoshi Son definitely is. The way he handled the WeWork situation was bad...
by newfocogi on 1/21/25, 10:38 PM
> "OpenAI will continue to increase its consumption of Azure as OpenAI continues its work with Microsoft"
Not sure why, but the word choice of "consumption" feels like a reverse Freudian slip to me.
by barbazoo on 1/21/25, 10:40 PM
> This project will [...] support the re-industrialization of the United States
How?
by jklinger410 on 1/21/25, 10:40 PM
> starting in Texas
Maybe I just don't get it. Texas seems like an awful place to do business.
by DoubleGlazing on 1/21/25, 10:40 PM
That's a ridiculous sum of money that could be better spent on much more worthy things.
by chrishare on 1/22/25, 8:13 AM
Looking forward to transparency about where this capital flows /s
by sillywalk on 1/21/25, 10:42 PM
Not to be confused by the other (non-fictional) DoD Stargate Project[0], that involved "remote-viewing" and other psychic crap.
The AI Stargate Project claims it will "create hundreds of thousands of American jobs". One has doubts.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
by SvenL on 1/21/25, 10:39 PM
Meh, why did they choose this name. Stargate does not deserve this…
by ulfw on 1/22/25, 3:55 AM
God forbid anyone would invest $500,000,000,000 to create jobs. No no no. 500 billion to destroy them for "more efficiency" so the owner class can get richer.
by retskrad on 1/21/25, 11:05 PM
While OpenAI and the rest of the industry is reaching AGI, Apple is out here shipping features with ChatGPT 3.5 technology.