SAN FRANCISCO — OpenAI, along with Oracle Corp. (NYSE: ORCL) and SoftBank, has announced plans for the development of five new data centers in the United States. The new projects are part of the $500 billion Stargate initiative to expand American data center infrastructure, which was announced in January at the White House.
Together with the flagship site in Abilene, Texas, the new data centers will bring Stargate to more than $400 billion in investment and almost 7 gigawatts (GW) of planned capacity over the next three years.
OpenAI and Oracle will partner on three of the facilities — located in Shackelford County, Texas; Doña Ana County, New Mexico; and an additional site at an undisclosed location in the Midwest — which represent a $300 billion agreement between the companies.
According to OpenAI, these projects are expected to create more than 25,000 onsite jobs and thousands of additional jobs throughout the country. Together, the facilities will offer up to 4.5 GW of capacity.
A partnership between SoftBank and OpenAI will develop the other two data centers, which will have the capacity to scale to 1.5 GW over the next 18 months. One of the sites is located in Lordstown, Ohio, with the other in Milam County, Texas.
SoftBank has broken ground on the Ohio facility, which is scheduled to be operational next year. SB Energy, a SoftBank Group company, is providing powered infrastructure for the Texas site.
According to OpenAI, more than 300 proposals for sites for the new data centers were submitted across more than 30 states.
OpenAI plans to announce further agreements to fulfill its $500 billion Stargate commitment by the end of 2025.
Founded in 2015, OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) research company based in San Francisco. The company announced it had surpassed 5,328 employees back in April.
— Hayden Spiess