On Tuesday, the newly elected US President Donald Trump announced a massive project called Stargate, costing 500 billion US dollars. This project involves creating large AI data centers led by SoftBank, OpenAI, and Oracle, with participation from Nvidia and the investment fund MGX of the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates. At least one Stargate data center is already under construction on a field in Texas, northwest of Abilene. The Houston-based company Lancium is developing this site, initially with a connection capacity of 200 megawatts (MW).
The connection capacity of the Lancium Clean Campus in Abilene is expected to increase to 1 gigawatt (GW). Lancium is also planning another Clean Campus near Fort Stockton. The region has large wind farms that can provide more than enough energy. Texas is the US state with the largest wind energy capacity, with about 40 GW in operation. For comparison, Germany has 63.5 GW on land and more than 8 GW offshore. Lancium assures that the enormous power needs of the data centers will not affect the local power supply. Power line capacities will be expanded if necessary. In other parts of the USA, such as Virginia near Washington’s Dulles International Airport, capacities are already tight.
Oracle was named as a user of the Lancium Clean Campus in 2024. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), part of Larry Ellison’s company, is building a data center with 131,072 Nvidia-Blackwell accelerators. It is unclear if this refers to the Abilene data center. OCI is the main customer of Ampere Computing, which develops server processors with ARM cores. Oracle owns 29 percent of Ampere. The chairman of Project Stargate is SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, who has invested in AI technology for years. SoftBank continues to hold a majority stake in the British company ARM and bought the AI chip developer Graphcore in mid-2024. According to media reports, SoftBank wants ARM to develop its own AI chips for data centers. There is speculation that ARM is considering buying Ampere. However, each Nvidia GB200 already contains many ARM cores. South of Texas, in Mexico, the contractor Foxconn is building what it claims will be the largest factory for Nvidia AI accelerators.
Lancium is working with Crusoe Energy to build the Clean Campus in Abilene. Billionaire Peter Thiel has invested in Crusoe Energy Systems, which used to focus on cryptocurrency data centers. The company aimed to capture gas that would otherwise be flared and use it to power Bitcoin mining (Digital Flare Mitigation). The construction company DPR Construction is responsible for building the data centers. In a project in San Antonio, DPR uses prefabricated elements to speed up construction.
In March 2024, there were speculations about Project Stargate, with Microsoft considered a partner at the time. Microsoft is the largest investor in OpenAI. In the press release for Stargate, OpenAI assures that it will continue to use Microsoft Azure’s computing power. However, US media see Project Stargate as a setback for Microsoft. Elon Musk, whose company xAI operates and expands one of the largest AI data centers in the USA, called Colossus, in Memphis, Tennessee, recently cast doubt on the financing of Stargate.