When did Stargate start, the AI project that has reignited rivalry between Musk and Altman

OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank have come together for this USD 500 billion project announced by US President Donald Trump

Hyderabad: The feud between the two tech billionaires Elon Musk and Sam Altman that started on OpenAI’s board has reignited. This time the two are exchanging barbs over the Stargate artificial intelligence infrastructure project, backed by President Donald Trump.

“The largest AI infrastructure project in history with an investment of $500 billion” was announced by Trump on Jan 21. Sam Altman of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, along with Oracle’s Larry Ellison and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son have come together for this project. The initial investment will be $100 billion.

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But the Tesla CEO, a close Trump adviser, questioned the value of the investment hours later. “They don’t actually have the money,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X. “SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority.”

Altman responded to say Musk was “wrong, as you surely know” and inviting Musk to come visit the first site in Texas that is already under construction.

Musk and Sam Altman co-founded OpenAI as a non-profit in 2015 but difference cropped up after Musk exited OpenAI’s board in 2018. Last year, Musk sued Altman and other OpenAI cofounders, accusing them of abandoning the startup’s original mission to develop AI for the benefit of humanity. It claimed OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft “flipped the narrative” of the company’s original mission.

How did Stargate start

The initial plans for Stargate go back to the Biden administration.

Tech news outlet The Information first reported on an OpenAI data centre project called Stargate in March 2024, indicating that it’s been in the works long before Trump announced it.

Another company — Crusoe Energy Systems — announced in July it was building a large and “specially designed AI data center” at the northwest edge of Abilene, Texas, at a site run by energy technology company Lancium.

Crusoe and Lancium said in a joint statement at the time that the project was “supported by a multibillion-dollar investment” but didn’t disclose its backers.

Abilene Mayor Weldon Hurt said construction began about nine months ago but “we didn’t know it was going to be quite this big. We thought it was going to be about a third of this size.”

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison said the Abilene project is the first of about 10 data centre buildings currently being built and that number could expand to 20.

Where is Microsoft?

Missing from Trump’s press conference on Jan 21 was Microsoft, which has long supported OpenAI with billions of dollars in investments and enabling its data centres to be used to build the models behind ChatGPT and other generative AI tools.

Microsoft said this week it is also investing in the Stargate project but put out a statement noting that its OpenAI partnership will “evolve” in a way that enables OpenAI “to build additional capacity, primarily for research and training of models.”

The push to build data centres predates Trump’s presidency. Last October, financial company Blackstone estimated that the US would see $1 trillion invested in data centres over five years, with another $1 trillion being committed internationally.

With inputs from AP