OpenAI is planning to build five new data centers in the United States as part of the Stargate initiative, the company announced on Tuesday. The sites, which are being developed in partnership with Oracle and SoftBank, bring Stargate’s current planned capacity to nearly 7 gigawatts—roughly the same amount of power as seven large-scale nuclear reactors.
“AI is different from the internet in a lot of ways, but one of them is just how much infrastructure it takes,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during a press briefing in Abilene, Texas, on Tuesday. He argued that the US “cannot fall behind on this” and the “innovative spirit” of Texas provides a model for how to scale “bigger, faster, cheaper, better.”
Three of the new sites, in Shackelford County, Texas; Doña Ana County, New Mexico; and a yet-to-be-disclosed location in the Midwest, are being developed in partnership with Oracle. The move follows an agreement Oracle and OpenAI announced in July to develop up to 4.5 gigawatts of US data center capacity on top of what the two companies are already building at the first Stargate facility in Abilene.
OpenAI claims the new data centers, along with a planned 600 megawatt expansion of the Abilene site, will create more than 25,000 onsite jobs, though the number of workers required to build data centers typically dwarfs the amount needed to maintain them afterwards.
The two remaining sites are being helmed by OpenAI and SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary that develops solar and battery projects. These are located in Lordstown, Ohio, and Milam County, Texas.
Stargate is one of several major US technology infrastructure projects that have been announced since President Donald Trump took office at the start of the year. OpenAI said in January that the $500 billion, 10 gigawatt commitment between the ChatGPT maker, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX would “secure American leadership in AI” and “create hundreds of thousands of American jobs.”
Trump touted the mammoth initiative just two days after he returned to the White House, promising that it would accelerate American progress in artificial intelligence and help the US compete against China and other nations. In July, Trump announced an AI action plan that called for speedy infrastructure development and limited red tape as the US tries to beat other countries in the quest for advanced AI. “We believe we’re in an AI race,” White House AI czar David Sacks said at the time. “We want the United States to win that race.”
OpenAI initially framed Stargate as a “new company” that would be chaired by Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son. Now, however, executives close to the project say it’s an umbrella brand name used to refer to all of OpenAI’s data center projects—except those developed in partnership with Microsoft.
The flagship site in Abilene is primarily owned and operated by Oracle, with OpenAI acting as the primary tenant, according to executives close to the project. The buildout, which is being managed by the data center startup Crusoe, is on track to be completed by mid-2026, sources close to the project say. It is already running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and supporting OpenAI training and inference workloads, those sources add.
Oracle is in the process of standing up eight data center halls in Abilene, which will each support roughly 100 megawatts of power. One of those buildings is currently complete, and another one is close to being finalized. When it is done, the facility will house more than 400,000 GPUs and support more than 1.4 gigawatts of power, sources close to the project say.
The initial Stargate announcement called for companies with land, equipment, and other relevant resources to get involved. After it was published, OpenAI executives say they were inundated with messages from firms that wanted to participate.
One executive estimates that OpenAI has surveyed around 700 sites in the US where data centers could potentially be built. For the five projects announced Tuesday, OpenAI claims it reviewed more than 300 proposals together with its partners from roughly 30 states.
In a policy white paper released Tuesday, OpenAI framed AI infrastructure as a crucial tool the United States will need to beat China and become a manufacturing powerhouse. “Today, Communist Party–led China is developing electricity resources at unmatched velocity while the US falls behind,” the document argues. “China’s immense electricity consumption underscores not only its industrial dominance but its ability to rapidly deploy AI infrastructure including new data centers, semiconductor fabs, and manufacturing hubs.”
Earlier this week, OpenAI also announced a new strategic partnership with Nvidia to deploy 10 gigawatts of data center capacity—dwarfing even the size of OpenAI’s deal with Oracle. As part of the arrangement, Nvidia is investing up to $100 billion in OpenAI, though neither company shared specifics about the exact structure of the funding. The initial build-out will include 4 to 5 million GPUs, Nvidia said, and the chipmaker will make investments “progressively” as each gigawatt is deployed.
OpenAI’s first Nvidia-powered system, which will be built with the hardware maker’s Vera Rubin GPUs, will be operational in the second half of 2026, the two companies said. In an interview with CNBC, Altman said that the undertaking would “expand on the Stargate ambitions.”
Jonathan Koomey, a visiting professor at UC Berkeley who has studied computing and data center efficiency for decades, says the enormous size of OpenAI’s data center investments may not be enough to guarantee the company’s success. Earlier this year, the Chinese startup DeepSeek debuted an impressive AI model built using relatively little computing power, a feat that suggested OpenAI could still be beat out by lesser-resourced competitors.
“OpenAI are making a bet that scale will continue to be the best way to get performance from large learning models, and if that’s true—and if they’re able to find applications that people really want and are willing to pay for—then it will all work out fine,” Koomey says. But that thesis has still yet to be proven, he adds.
Koomey is also concerned that the tech industry may be abandoning its environmental commitments in pursuit of new data center capacity, and he questions whether such sacrifices are really warranted. “I would question the sense of urgency,” he says.
While some data center projects, like a massive complex being developed by Meta in Louisiana, have received pushback from the local community, the site in Abilene appears to have strong support from local politicians. Mayor Weldon Hurt attended the press briefing alongside Senator Ted Cruz on Tuesday to champion the initiative.
“In my view, we should have a very light-touch regulatory approach because we are in a race with China,” Cruz told a group of reporters. He said that if “we want freedom and free speech and free enterprise and individual liberty to dictate AI” the United States needs to “win the race for AI. That’s happening right now. And that’s why Stargate is so important.”
Since May, OpenAI has also announced Stargate UK and Stargate UAE, which aim to build out large-scale data center projects abroad. Trump administration officials have helped arrange some of the infrastructure deals with allied nations, betting the deals would help American companies capture market share globally.
But questions have swirled around Stargate ever since its inception. Last month, Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal both reported that progress had been delayed by trade uncertainty and soaring hardware costs.
Koomey says the convoluted nature of some of the Stargate deals could prove to be another issue. “From an accounting perspective it’s very complicated and it has the potential to be a problem if things go south,” he says.
