Before there was 5 Gigawatt Abu Dhabi, there was Stargate, the “$500 Billion” series of data centers announced by the POTUS to be created by a consortium of OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank.
Or at least $500 Billion was the announced value/ cost of the full buildout of many data centers coming to locations around the US. Bloomberg recently did a tour of the very real initial Stargate Data Center being constructed in Abilene Texas, for apparently around $100 Billion.
Can that be right? $100 Billion being spent now? Bloomberg is also somewhat stunned by the ambition involved, and attempts to find the shakier parts of the future projections by Altman. Perhaps without more success than pointing out that there’s risk involved with so much “unknown”. Presumably Altman knows more than Bloomberg about what is going to happen.
Watch more episodes of The Circuit with Emily Chang: 
• The Circuit with Emily Chang 00:00 – Stargate intro 02:01 – Touring Stargate 04:03 – Big Tech AI race 05:09 – Sam Altman’s vision 06:22 – SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son 07:47 – Crusoe founding story 12:03 – Touring Data center 13:23 – OpenAI Studio Ghibli moment 16:14 – Energy challenges 20:35 – Bloomberg reporter reflection 24:19 – Risks 28:18 – Abilene local perspective 34:28 – AI and jobs 36:01 – Trump tariffs 40:00 – Booms and busts