OpenAI released an announcement on July 22, declaring that it has signed a new agreement with Oracle, adding 4.5 GW of data center capacity for the "Stargate" large-scale AI infrastructure, with the total scale exceeding 5 GW.
Agreement Highlights: 5 GW Era Officially Begins
According to the press release, OpenAI's this expansion is in line with the White House's previously promoted "10 GW AI Plan within the United States" and is a key piece of the $500 billion investment blueprint. The first Stargate I in Abilene, Texas, has expanded from 1.2 GW to about 2 GW; subsequently, it will establish sites in Michigan, Wisconsin, Wyoming, New Mexico, Georgia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Each ultra-large data center can consume up to 50 MW of electricity, estimated to simultaneously drive over 2 million AI training and inference chips.
Massive Investment and Power Challenges
Market analysis points out that while the 4.5 GW additional capacity injects cloud momentum for OpenAI, it also pushes financial and energy pressures to an unprecedented height. The overall $500 billion investment scale has raised risk warnings from credit institutions, and the slowdown of SoftBank's funding momentum further highlights the difficulty of financing.
Another challenge is power supply: Such a scale will create a long-term load on the US power grid and environment. Local governments and utility units must simultaneously accelerate the upgrade of power transmission and distribution and the proportion of renewable energy to support the continuing expansion of AI computing flood.
Refuting WSJ?
It is worth mentioning that on the same day, earlier on July 22, the Wall Street Journal cited informed sources in a news article, revealing that the "Stargate" project led by SoftBank and OpenAI originally planned to invest $500 billion in building data centers to support AI development, but after six months of launch, no project had yet landed.
Informed sources said that although the project had promised to "immediately" invest $100 billion, the current goal has shifted to building a small data center with a lower design cost by the end of this year.
Therefore, the community speculates that the latest announcement released by OpenAI yesterday (22nd) is also an immediate response to the WSJ report.
