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Dive brief:
- A joint venture between OpenAI, Softbank and Oracle plans to invest $100 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure, with the potential to scale to $500 billion by the end of President Donald Trump’s second term, according to a conference White House press release.
- Stargate, the recently announced initiative, includes 10 data centers, including one already under construction in Abilene, Texas, Larry Ellison, Oracle’s president and chief technology officer, said during Tuesday’s event at the White House. Each facility will occupy around 500,000 square meters.
- Plans call for the initiative to double to 20 buildings, with additional locations beyond Abilene, he added. No details on the location or timing of the other data centers were announced.
Diving knowledge:
The news comes as the construction industry works on an already overflowing portfolio of data center projects.
Hyperscalers and tech companies are competing to expand their data center capacity to meet the growing demand. According to Dell’Oro Group, big tech companies were poised to invest more than $180 billion in data center expansions and related infrastructure costs last year.
This is good news for contractors in the data center space. Trump hopes the private funding initiative will spur significant investment in the U.S. data center market and ensure America’s leadership in AI innovation and infrastructure.
“Starting immediately, Stargate will build the physical and virtual infrastructure to power the next generation of AI advances,” Trump said during the press conference. “That will include building colossal data centers — very, very massive structures.”
In addition, Trump pledged to streamline permits and speed up project timelines to ensure the initiative’s success. he said energy projects will play a key role in supporting this AI infrastructure build.
“I’m going to help a lot with emergency declarations, because we have an emergency, we have to build these things,” Trump said. “So, they have to produce a lot of electricity, and we will make it possible for them to do this production very easily, in their own plants if they want. They will build the power generation.”
