OpenAI's push to build more data centers to fuel its generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT reached a frenetic pace this week with plans that, if realized, could mean hundreds of billions of dollars in investment.
Alongside the cloud computing company Oracle and the Japanese investment firm SoftBank, OpenAI said it would stand up five new data center sites in Texas, New Mexico, Ohio and a yet-to-be-announced location in the Midwest.
It's the latest announcement in what's been dubbed the Stargate project, a massive infrastructure undertaking to scale up OpenAI's ability to build and operate AI models. OpenAI already has a site in Abilene, Texas, and other projects with the computing provider CoreWeave are already under development. The whole Stargate project is expected to include 10 gigawatts of computing power and cost $500 billion. This week's announcements bring the project to almost 7 gigawatts of capacity and more than $400 billion in the next three years.
"AI can only fulfill its promise if we build the compute to power it," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement. "That compute is the key to ensuring everyone can benefit from AI and to unlocking future breakthroughs. We're already making historic progress toward that goal through Stargate and moving quickly not just to meet its initial commitment, but to lay the foundation for what comes next."
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
The push for more and better AI has driven the tech industry's incredible thirst for computing power in recent years, and data centers have become a hot commodity. The raw materials of AI are more than just the chips made by Nvidia and its competitors. Data centers take up large expanses of land, drink up vast quantities of water to cool those computers and rely on astronomical amounts of electricity to operate them all. Not everyone is happy about this growth. Some communities have pushed back, banning data centers or putting serious curbs on them.
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Altman and other tech executives are optimistic that more computing power will mean smarter models that can do things like, maybe, cure cancer. In a post on his personal blog this week, Altman said his vision is for a "factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week," which would represent exponential growth for the data center industry.
Whether all of that data center development happens, of course, is still an open question. Financing can be fickle, permitting is difficult enough that President Trump made it a centerpiece of his AI Action Plan, and the AI business changes fast.