I promised myself to post every Monday something that is not strictly related with the news cycle. On the other hand, it’s also nice to drop some shorter posts about relevant news in the industry as they happen, so here it goes he first one: OpenAI announced The Stargate Project.
Last year Sam Altman said that it needed $7T to reach AGI1, a very sizeable and oddly specific amount of money. The amount was intended to cove the entire “supply chain”, from AI chip factories (including electricity and equipment) to AI models and applications.
Now it seems that half a trillion dollars is a decent amount to start:
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 equity funders are the usual suspects (Microsoft, Nvidia), some new entries (Oracle, which is living a second youth), and old timers (SoftBank was mentioned in the $7T initiative last year).
For now it seems a partnership of private actors with no funding from the US government, although the announcement was given at The White House by the newly appointed president Trump. The initial plans for Stargate pre-dates the new administration and go back to March 2024:
OpenAI wrote in a letter to the Biden administration’s Commerce Department last fall that planning and permitting for such projects “can be lengthy and complex, particularly for energy infrastructure.”
It’s possible that the Trump administration will reduce regulation to make it easier to build new infrastructure such as new electricity generation capacity.
We could be at a pivotal moment here. Maybe this new investment push will generate new breakthroughs and it will reboot the march towards better performance and capabilities, which has stalled a bit. Or maybe it will be the certification that we need to work with what we already have, and it’s going to be enough.
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Defining AGI is hard, but Microsoft and OpenAI had to come up with a definition in their agreement, so they use a financial metric: generating at least $100B in profit.