OpenAI’s infrastructure platform to open five new data centers
Courtesy photo via OpenAI
By
Chris Teale
The company will add locations in Texas, New Mexico, Ohio and elsewhere in the Midwest, representing seven gigawatts of planned capacity for Stargate out of its original 10 gigawatt commitment.
OpenAI will open new data centers in Ohio, New Mexico, an unnamed Midwest location and Texas, while adding capacity at an existing Texas site to boost its artificial intelligence computing capacity, the company announced this week.
The company, which gained fame for its ChatGPT generative AI tool, will open its new data centers in Lordstown, Ohio; Shackelford County, Texas; Milam County, Texas; Doña Ana County, New Mexico; and a site in the Midwest, which it expects to announce soon. In addition, a site near OpenAI’s existing data center in Abilene, Texas is expected to expand by 600 megawatts.
Altogether, the sites are expected to deliver almost seven gigawatts in power generation capacity and over $400 billion in investment over the next three years, and create more than 25,000 jobs on site as well as tens of thousands of additional jobs.
Also partnering on the sites are Oracle and SoftBank, as part of the Stargate initiative, a joint effort to build an overarching AI infrastructure platform. The companies pledged to spend $500 billion in the next four years to build new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States. The data center in Abilene is already running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure technology.
“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.”
The five new sites were chosen through what OpenAI described as a “rigorous nationwide process” that it launched in January. The companies reviewed over 300 proposals from more than 30 states before making their selections, with more expected to follow.
In Lordstown, SoftBank has already broken ground on an advanced data center design, which it says is on track to be operational next year. The site in Milam County will be developed in partnership with SB Energy, a SoftBank Group company, which is providing powered infrastructure for a fast-build data center site. OpenAI said that these two sites will help enable faster deployment, greater scalability and improved cost efficiency, which it said will make high-performance computing more widely accessible.
“Stargate is harnessing SoftBank’s innovative data center design and energy expertise to deliver the scalable compute that powers AI’s future,” Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group Corp, said in a statement. “Together with OpenAI, Arm, and our Stargate partners, we are paving the way for a new era where AI advances humanity.”
OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle first announced Stargate in January at the White House alongside President Donald Trump, who called it the “the largest AI infrastructure project in history.” Trump suggested he might use emergency declarations to get the data centers and associated energy infrastructure built quickly and said it is crucial to ensure the U.S. stays competitive with China in the race to deploy AI.
Data centers are critical in helping governments at all levels embrace and roll out AI, but they are not without controversy. Advocates are worried about their impacts on energy consumption, the price to consumers and the strain they place on natural resources, including water. Those concerns prompted two lawmakers to introduce legislation last week mandating a joint federal study on the effects of data centers on rural communities.
But demand for data centers is likely to grow quickly. In a study last year, McKinsey & Company estimated that global demand for data center capacity could rise at an annual rate of between 19 and 22 percent from 2023 to 2030. And to avoid a deficit in supply and demand, McKinsey said at least twice the data center capacity built since 2000 would have to be built in less than a quarter of the time.
Meanwhile, tech companies are spending big on data center capacity, and this partnership between several big players is indicative of that.
“Oracle’s reliable, scalable, and secure AI infrastructure is helping OpenAI rapidly scale its business,” Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk said in a statement. “To meet this enormous demand, we continue to expand OCI’s footprint at an unrivaled pace to deliver the most performant and cost-effective AI training and inferencing.”