President Donald Trump made a major infrastructure project announcement on his second day in office, Tuesday 21 jan 2025.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son and Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison appeared at the White House Tuesday afternoon alongside President Donald Trump to announce the creation of Stargate: a new american company investing $500 Billion… at least!
So put that name down in your books.
Announcing The Stargate Project:
The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States. We will begin deploying $100 billion immediately. This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world. 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.
Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI are the key initial technology partners. 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.
As part of Stargate, Oracle, NVIDIA, and OpenAI will closely collaborate to build and operate this computing system. This builds on a deep collaboration between OpenAI and NVIDIA going back to 2016 and a newer partnership between OpenAI and Oracle.
This also builds on the existing OpenAI partnership with Microsoft. OpenAI will continue to increase its consumption of Azure as OpenAI continues its work with Microsoft with this additional compute to train leading models and deliver great products and services.
All of us look forward to continuing to build and develop AI—and in particular AGI—for the benefit of all of humanity. We believe that this new step is critical on the path, and will enable creative people to figure out how to use AI to elevate humanity.
Elon Musk, who have been the strongest supporter of Trump so far didn’t appear particularly excited:
But Microsoft’s Satia Nadella is clear:
Science Fiction?
Just to be clear, Stargate is a 1994 science fiction movie directed and co-written by Roland Emmerich, and a military science fiction media franchise owned by Amazon MGM Studios. “Stargate” is an ancient ring-shaped device that creates a wormhole (specifically an Einstein Rosen bridge) device that enables nearly instantaneous travel across the cosmos.
However, though this new project goals are likely more modest than interstellar teleportation, it is a new big bet to consolidate America’s lead over China. Setting aside all differences, it reminds Kennedy’s Moonshot Speech and bet.
What we are seeing is but a flash of what will be studied in the future as a new “cold” (perhaps with a different adjective) war between USA and China to control the development of key technologies. In this case, Artificial Intelligence, as it was sharply described last year by Leopold Aschenbrenner1:
Superintelligence will give a decisive economic and military advantage. China isn’t at all out of the game yet. In the race to AGI, the free world’s very survival will be at stake. Can we maintain our preeminence over the authoritarian powers? And will we manage to avoid self-destruction along the way?
Before the decade is out, we will have built superintelligence. That is what most of this series has been about. For most people I talk to in SF, that’s where the screen goes black. But the decade after—the 2030s—will be at least as eventful. By the end of it, the world will have been utterly, unrecognizably transformed. A new world order will have been forged. But alas—that’s a story for another time.
At this point, you may think that I and all the other SF-folk are totally crazy. But consider, just for a moment: what if they’re right?
Right now, there’s perhaps a few hundred people in the world who realize what’s about to hit us, who understand just how crazy things are about to get, who have situational awareness.
US Big Tech and Big Capital are all fully engaged
In this interview with Bari Weiss, Marc Andreessen describes a “horrifying” meeting with previous (Biden) US administration2:
Their plan was to control AI by only allowing 3 companies to create AI, stop all competitors, and then classify the underlying science used to create and run AI models.
When he asked how they planned to this, they said they would do it the same way they did with certain areas of physics during the Cold War.
Meanwhile…
The rest of the world is taking positions:
So put that name down in your books.
And make your bets!
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- Aschenbrenner, Leopold. «SITUATIONAL AWARENESS: The Decade Ahead», June 2024. https://situational-awareness.ai/. ↩︎
- Free Press Honestly podcast with Bari Weiss ↩︎
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