Stargate Project: $500B AI Data Center Plan Explained

What Stargate is structurally

Stargate LLC is a Delaware joint venture announced on January 21, 2025, with OpenAI and SoftBank as lead partners: SoftBank holds financial responsibility and its founder Masayoshi Son serves as chairman, while OpenAI holds operational responsibility. The other two initial equity funders are Oracle and MGX, an Abu Dhabi state-backed investment fund. OpenAI's own announcement named Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle and OpenAI as the venture's key initial technology partners, meaning suppliers of chips, cloud software or networking rather than sources of equity capital. [1][2]

Reporting in the weeks after the announcement put initial capital commitments at $19 billion each from OpenAI and SoftBank, with Oracle and MGX together committing $7 billion, against a first tranche of $100 billion. Those figures describe the venture's own capital structure, not the $500 billion headline: OpenAI and SoftBank were reported to each hold a 40% equity stake in Stargate, with Oracle and MGX splitting the remainder. [3]

What $500 billion and $100 billion actually meant

OpenAI's announcement said Stargate "intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years" and would "begin deploying $100 billion immediately." The wording distinguishes an intention over a multi-year horizon from a smaller sum committed at launch. SoftBank's own press release, published the following day, used the same wording and did not name a specific dollar figure already in hand beyond the $100 billion tranche. [2][4]

Atlas interpretation: The $500 billion figure described a target for total spending by 2029 across a venture whose equity partners had committed roughly $33 billion between them, with the rest expected to come from limited partners and debt. SoftBank explored project financing, a technique associated with capital-intensive infrastructure like oil and gas pipelines, in which anchor investors put up a fraction of total cost and the balance is borrowed against the project's expected cash flows. One financing scenario reported in February 2025 had SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and MGX contributing roughly 10% of overall cost in equity and tapping debt markets for the remainder, and SoftBank Group was separately reported to be funding its own $100 billion Stargate commitment roughly 80% through debt. [5][6]

Elon Musk publicly disputed the venture's ability to fund itself the day after the announcement, writing on X that "they don't actually have the money" and that SoftBank had "well under $10 billion secured." Sam Altman replied that Musk was "wrong, as you surely know" and, in a later post, called him a "swindler." Neither side published financial documentation to settle the dispute at the time. [7]

How this changed OpenAI's relationship with Microsoft

Before Stargate, Microsoft held an exclusive right to supply OpenAI's cloud computing capacity, a position tied to its multibillion-dollar investment in the company. Microsoft's own blog post, published the same day as the Stargate announcement, said this exclusivity was ending: Microsoft would instead hold a right of first refusal on new OpenAI compute capacity, meaning OpenAI could take a set of terms to another provider only after first offering Microsoft the chance to match them. Microsoft separately said it had approved OpenAI building additional capacity, mostly for research and model training, outside that arrangement. [8]

The blog post said other terms of the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership, including Azure's exclusive right to run the OpenAI API and Microsoft's access to OpenAI's intellectual property for products like Copilot, remained in place through 2030, and that OpenAI would keep increasing its Azure usage even as it built Stargate capacity through Oracle. Stargate's data centers, including the Abilene site, run on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure rather than Azure, so the change gave OpenAI a second large infrastructure track alongside its existing Microsoft relationship rather than replacing it. [8][2]

What was actually under construction: Abilene, Texas

The concrete, near-term piece of Stargate was a data center campus in Abilene, Texas, built by Crusoe and run on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Construction began in June 2024, before the January 2025 announcement, under a design for eight buildings covering roughly four million square feet with a planned capacity of about 1.2 gigawatts. Oracle began delivering the first NVIDIA GB200 server racks to the site in June 2025, and Crusoe said the campus's first two buildings were energized and running early training and inference workloads by late September 2025, roughly a year after the announcement. [9]

Atlas interpretation: Two operational buildings out of a planned eight, roughly twenty months after ground was broken, is a meaningful construction milestone but a small fraction of the physical footprint the $500 billion figure implied, and Abilene was consistently described as the most advanced of Stargate's proposed sites. The gap between the headline commitment and what a single flagship site had achieved by its first anniversary is one reason analysts treated the four-year, half-trillion-dollar figure as aspirational rather than contracted. [9][5]

Where the commitment stood in the following year

Reporting in August 2025 found that Stargate as a joint legal entity had not raised funds against the full $500 billion figure, citing market uncertainty, trade policy and AI hardware valuations as reasons for delay. By early 2026, reporting on the venture described continuing friction between OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank over how responsibilities and financial risk should be split, and said the three-way structure had been reworked into a narrower Oracle-OpenAI arrangement for site development, with SoftBank's energy subsidiary separately developing and owning at least one new site, a 1-gigawatt campus in Milam County, Texas, where ground was broken in October 2025. That reporting said the Stargate LLC entity itself had not hired staff more than a year after the announcement, and that OpenAI had pursued cloud capacity deals with other providers including AWS and Google Cloud alongside the Stargate sites. [5][10]