OPENAI, SOFTBANK, Oracle and NVIDIA are involved in this pharaonic initiative. It testifies to the insatiable appetite of the Big Tech for more computing power, despite the Deepseek rupture.
40 billion dollars: This is the astronomical amount of the check that Oracle will sign in Nvidia to acquire 400,000 GB200 graphics cards, the last “superpuce” of the company to train and run AI algorithms. They will come to fuel the Abilene data center, in Texas, a pharaonic project at $ 500 billion, with which OPENAI and the Japanese Softbank conglomerate are also associated. The data center should be operational by mid-2026.
This is the first project launched as part of Stargate, the investment program of $ 500 billion over four years in the United States in AI infrastructure, announced with great fanfare in January by the Trump administration. Led by Openai, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX, it is also supported by Microsoft, Nvidia and Arm.
Expenses in AI infrastructure
This new project shows that, if the Frugal AI way shown by the Chinese company Deepseek at the beginning of the year has suggested that staggering expenses in giant data centers were going to slow down, it is ultimately the opposite that occurs.
Once finalized, the Abilene data center should compete in size with the Colossus project, of which Elon Musk launched the construction last year in Memphis, in Tennessee, to supply its company XAI in computing power. It should bring together no less than a million NVIDIA graphic processors. During the announcement of the Stargate project, the billionaire, close to Donald Trump, publicly criticized the program, saying that the companies involved did not have the funds to carry it out and getting involved on its potential.
Perhaps Musk fears that he shadows his own colossus project, or perhaps it is necessary to read an additional episode in the rivalry which has long opposed Sam Altman, the boss of Openai, and Elon Musk, who was among the founding members of the company before slamming the door. It is also possible that Musk was simply frustrated not to have been involved in Stargate.
Other large-scale projects are also underway in the United States, including a $ 10 billion data center built by Meta in northern Louisiana, and another from Amazon in Indiana for $ 11 billion.
Openai emancipates a little more from Microsoft
Behind the Abilene project, we also find the growing will of Openai to emancipate from Microsoft. Since the signing of this agreement, Microsoft is no longer the exclusive cloud supplier of OpenAI, which is now free to use Multicloud to meet its insatiable computer power needs. Since the record fundraising of $ 40 billion carried out by OPENAI in March, Microsoft is no longer the majority investor of the company, overshadowed by SoftBank, which participated in the fundraising up to $ 30 billion.
Microsoft’s grip on Openai was historically carried out through billions of dollars invested by the group in the Sam Altman start-up, mainly in the form of cloud credits, of which Openai was dependent to draw the colossal computing power necessary for the operation and training of its generative AI algorithms. To earn more independence, Openai must therefore find ways to get elsewhere than at Microsoft Azure, hence this giant data center project.
The rising star of Texas
The project also shows the irresistible rise of Texas as a pole of new technologies. If it is not yet able to compete with Silicon Valley, the Lone Star State has attracted large companies, investors and start-ups, seduced by its quality of life, its very low taxes, its low level of regulation, its energy at an attractive price and the low cost of building and construction. Elon Musk showed the example by moving the headquarters of Tesla de la Silicon Valley to Austin. The capital of Texas is thus established as a major pole of tech in the United States, and the rest of the State accumulates ambitious infrastructure projects, as Abilene, but also the Reese Technology Center (future cybersecurity pole), or the new Apple server factory.
Although strongly anchored on the right, Texas is also a leader of the country on renewable energies, thanks to its climate (windy and sunny), but also to its very business friendly policy, which attracts businesses and greatly facilitates the conduct of ambitious projects – where in California, the major projects are strongly slowed down by the “Nimby” movement.
The relationship between the very conservative leaders of Texas and the tech industry is not a long, quiet river. Governor Greg Abbott has just signed an online security law forcing Google and Apple to verify the age of users of their respective app stores, a law which aroused lively opposition from these two companies.
A beginning of success for Trump
Finally, this new data center also testifies to a certain success of the strategy implemented by Donald Trump to stimulate tech investment on American soil.
If the investment in Stargate is part of private companies, the government is committed to providing significant support for regulation and public policy. Donald Trump thus revoked a decree signed by Joe Biden to supervise the development of the AI, and undertook to coordinate the efforts led by the various companies in the service of a common goal, as well as to facilitate the allocation of permit, reduce paperwork and administrative heaviness. He is more generally committed to lowering tax and regulations on companies, as well as to reduce the price of energy, although its room for maneuver in this area is limited.
The American president finally used more direct pressures, threatening companies with prohibitive customs rights, which also gave certain results, including an additional TSMC investment in the United States. This last part of his strategy may however quickly show his limits, on the one hand because the president continues to change course on customs duties, on the other because trials are brought to him to challenge the legality of the latter.
The tax reform that the Trump administration is currently trying to have the Congress voted by the Congress, if it is preparing to further worsen the American deficit, could, on the other hand, perpetuating the drop in corporate tax voted in 2017, to endorse the attractiveness of the United States for tech investments.
