alt Hacker NewsStargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
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Texas positioning itself better than expected for AI and EVs is the plot twist the peasants needed
If they plan to transition off oil/nuclear it will be fun to watch
Sad waste of money that will go in Oracle licenses... The lost liberties of the American people is just a small feat... beside the point
Some reports[0] paint this as something Trump announced and that the US Government is heavily involved with but the announcement only mentions private sector (and lead by Japan's Softbank at that). Is the US also putting in money? How much control of the venture is private vs public here?
0. https://www.thewrap.com/trump-open-ai-oracle-stargate-ai-inf...
1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-announces-private-sector-...
Data centers are overrated, local AI is what’s necessary for humanoid (and other) robots, which will be the most economically impactful use case.
Why are corporations announcing business deals from the White House? There doesn’t seem to be any public ownership/benefit here, aside from potential job creation. Which could be significant. But the American public doesn’t seem to gain anything from this new company.
I'm watching the announcement live from the white house and something about this just feels so strange and dystopian.
Altman rising to the top and becoming the defacto state preferred leader of AI in the US is wild. Fair play to him.
They had me at "Oracle" ...
Here is what I think is going on in this announcement. Take the 4 major commodity cloud companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle) and determine: do they have big data centers and do they have their own AI product organization?
- Google has a massive data center division (Google Cloud / GCP) and a massive AI product division (Deep Mind / Gemini).
- Microsoft has a massive data center division (Azure) but no significant AI product division; for the most part, they build their "Copilot" functionality atop their partner version of the OpenAI APIs.
- Amazon has a massive data center division (Amazon Web Services / AWS) but no significant AI product division; for the most part, they are hedging their bets here with an investment in Anthropic and support for running models inside AWS (e.g. Bedrock).
- Oracle has a massive data center division (Oracle Cloud / OCI) but no significant AI product division.
Now look at OpenAI by comparison. OpenAI has no data center division, as the whole company is basically the AI product division and related R&D. But, at the moment, their data centers come exclusively from their partnership with Microsoft.
This announcement is OpenAI succeeding in a multi-party negotiation with Microsoft, Oracle, and the new administration of the US Gov't. Oracle will build the new data centers, which it knows how to do. OpenAI will use the compute in these new data centers, which it knows how to do. Microsoft granted OpenAI an exception to their exclusive cloud compute licensing arrangement, due to this special circumstance. Masa helps raise the money for the joint venture, which he knows how to do. US Gov't puts its seal on it to make it a more valuable joint venture and to clear regulatory roadblocks for big parallel data center build-outs. The current administration gets to take credit as "doing something in the AI space," while also framing it in national industrial policy terms ("data centers built in the USA").
The clear winner in all of this is OpenAI, which has politically and economically navigated its way to a multi-cloud arrangement, while still outsourcing physical data center management to Microsoft and Oracle. Probably their deal with Oracle will end up looking like their deal with Microsoft, where the trade is compute capacity for API credits that Oracle can use in its higher level database products.
OpenAI probably only needs two well-capitalized hardware providers competing for their CPU+GPU business in order to have a "good enough" commodity market to carry them to the next level of scaling, and now they have it.
Google increasingly has a strategic reason not to sell OpenAI any of its cloud compute, and Amazon could be headed in that direction too. So this was more strategically (and existentially) important to OpenAI than one might have imagined.
This here reminds me a bubble in the making. Like South Sea Bubble to be precise.
AI is good if you use it wisely. There were reports years ago about using AI in SoCal to detect wild fires, but in the end we see insurance companies using AI to withdraw from areas of high fire risk. Quite competent AI, isn't it?
> building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States
That's nice, but if I were spending $500bn on datacenters I'd probably try to put a few in places that serve other users. Centralised compute can only get you so far in terms of serving users.
This could potentially trigger an AI arms race between the US and China. The standard has been set, lets see what China responds with. Either way, it will accelerate the arrival of ASI, which in my opinion is probably a good thing.
The Silicon-Valley bubble universe continues to introduce entropy that it feeds off of itself... Naming this Stargate when some of the largest effects AI has had is removing humans from processes to make other, fewer humans more efficient is emblematic of this hollow naming ethos - continuing to use the portal to shunt more and more humans out of the process that is humanity, with fairly reckless abandon. Who is Ra, and who is sending the nuke where, in this naming scheme? You decide.
How have they already selected who gets this money? Usually the government announces a program and tries to be fair when allocating funds. Here they are just bankrolling an existing project. Interesting
1. At this scale, we’re not just talking about buying GPUs. It requires semiconductor fabs, assembly factories, power plants, batteries/lithium, cooling, water, hazardous waste disposal. These data centers are going to have to be massively geo-engineered arcologies.
2. What are they doing? AGI/ASI is a neat trick, but then what? I’m not asking because I don’t think there is an answer; I’m asking because I want the REAL answer. Larry Ellison was talking about RNA cancer vaccines. Well, I was the one that made the neural network model for the company with the US patent on this technique, and that pitch makes little sense. As the problem is understood today, the computational problems are 99% solved with laptop-class hardware. There are some remaining problems that are not solved by neural networks, but by molecular dynamics, which are done in FP64. Even if FP8 neural structure approximation speeds it up 100x, FP64 will be 99% of the computation. So what we today call “AI infrastructure” is not appropriate for the task they talk about. What is it appropriate for? Well, I know that Sam is a bit uncreative, so I assume he’s just going to keep following the “HER” timeline and make a massive playground for LLMs to talk to each other and leave humanity behind. I don’t think that is necessarily unworthy of our Apollo-scale commitment, but there are serious questions about the honest of the project, and what we should demand for transparency. We’re obviously headed toward a symbiotic merger where LLMs and GenAI are completely in control of our understanding of the world. There is a difference between watching a high-production movie for two hours, and then going back to reality, versus a never-ending stream of false sensory information engineered individually to specifically control your behavior. The only question is whether we will be able to see behind the curtain of the great Oz. That’s what I mean by transparency. Not financial or organizational, but actual code, data, model, and prompt transparency. Is this a fundamental right worth fighting for?
This is going to be the grift of the century. Sam will put Wall Street robber barons to shame.
It will be interesting to see how AWS responds. Jump on board, or offer up a competing vision otherwise their cloud risks being perceived as being left behind in terms of computing power.
What are people filling these datacenters with exactly if not nvidia?
Personally I wish they invested in optical photonic computing, taking it out of the research labs. It can be so much more energy efficient and faster to run than GPUs and TPUs.
O1 Pro's opinion on Stargate: Humans are hallucinating, again...
Didn't anyone involved in naming this 'Stargate' ever actually watch the series? Not a good name if you're trying to create AGI
Gerat. Larry gets cash thrown at his AI surveillance dystopia.
You know, I expected that they'd find or synthesize some naquadah to build an actual stargate and maybe even defeat the Goa'uld. The exciting stuff, not AI.
One of the key questions becomes: is this it for Europe?
How does a person with experience in digital marketing, graphic design, and lots of AI (text/image) usage get a small piece of this money?
SoftBank and MGX paying for all this, all foreign investment.
Where is the US government in all this? Why aren't they leading the charge? They obviously have the money.
> create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world.
100s of 1000s of jobs seems a bit exaggerated.
unless they have internally built models that are of much higher intelligence than what we have today, this seems like premature optimization
What will be powering all these data centers? The thought of exponentially increasing our fossil fuel consumption scares the hell out of me.
None of these companies have the inner resources to fund a 500B build.
Looks like the dollar printing press will continue to overheat in the coming years.
Future of AI being controlled by Oracle worries me
Am I wrong to conclude they just got rocked super hard by DeepSeek R1?
Wouldn't 500bn into quantum computing show better returns for civilization? Assuming it's about progress and ... not money.
Well it just got alot harder to check and see if/when a new Stargate tv show or movie might be coming.
"No Sam, for obvious reasons we cannot give you 6 trillion ... but how about 500 billion?"
Wow.
I hate having to rely on these drip-feed vague statements to gauge the fate of the planet.
Well - as part of the semi industry I'd like to say: Really appreciate it. Keep it coming!
Let’s say they develop AGI tomorrow. Is that really all she wrote for blue collar jobs?
Anyone know if this involves nuclear plants as well or is that a separate initiative?
AI surveillance on large scale
As a diehard fan of Stargate, I've gotta say I'm disappointed this has nothing to do with wormholes...
unless...
I guess these people are betting small and efficient models are not the future.
I hope they build those little nuclear reactors into these datacenters.
Why are we spending a half-trillion dollars on “AI infrastructure” when our actual infrastructure has been crumbling and underfunded for decades?