SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and Abu Dhabi-based tech investment firm MGX have joined forces to invest $500bn over the next four years in The Stargate Project, a new company that will build new AI infrastructure (datacentres) in the US, with $100bn to be deployed with immediate effect.
“This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world,” claimed OpenAI in this announcement. “This project will not only support the re-industrialisation of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies,” it added. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility.
SoftBank’s CEO, Masayoshi Son, who will be the chairman of Stargate Project, had hinted at something this big last December when he pledged that SoftBank would invest $100bn in the US during Donald Trump’s tenure as the 47th president of the US, with AI and its supporting infrastructure as the focus of that investment.
The new company was unveiled at a White House press briefing, during which Trump, in his first full day in office, described the move as “the largest AI infrastructure project by far in history” and one that would create 100,000 new jobs in the US.
He was joined by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (the developer of generative AI application ChatGPT), Softbank’s Son and Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, which is one of The Stargate Project’s key technology partners. (Bizarrely, Trump described Elisson as the “CEO of everything” during the press briefing.)
The focus of the briefing was very much about how this investment will help keep the US ahead of the rest of the world in terms of AI development, while not just helping US businesses but the entire population.
“We want to keep [AI developments] in this country,” stated Trump. “China is a competitor, others are competitors… I am going to help a lot with emergency declarations, because we have an emergency – we have to get this stuff built… This is a big thing.” The president noted that the datacentre sites will require a great deal of power and that he will do whatever is needed to ensure that Stargate is able, if required, to develop its own power plants and supporting infrastructure at the same sites as the datacentres. (Trump separately revoked an executive order introduced by his predecessor, Joe Biden, which required companies developing AI systems that could impact US national security, the economy, public health or safety to submit safety testing data to US government authorities before their systems were made available for use.)
Ellison noted that the first Stargate datacentre is already under construction in Abilene, Texas, where there will be 10 initial buildings (and eventually 20 buildings) each of 500,000 square feet: Further sites are being evaluated. Ellison cited “maintaining and understanding” healthcare records, in order to enable better targeted healthcare plans for everyone in the US, as an example of the kind of application that Stargate would enable.
SoftBank’s Son added that Stargate “is not just for business – this is to help people’s lives… [we] will solve many issues with the power of AI.” He added that Stargate will help deliver artificial general intelligence (AGI), which is AI with human-like intelligence, but that this is not the end goal. “AGI is coming very soon and then artificial superintelligence will come to solve the issues that mankind would never have thought could be solved,” he added. (Artificial superintelligence is currently a hypothetical concept with intellect beyond the capability of humans.)
Altman said he was happy that Stargate will help AGI be developed in the US and spoke briefly about the impact that Stargate’s platforms will have on healthcare in general, stating that he expected the resulting AI to help eradicate current diseases at a rapid rate.
OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, Microsoft (a major investor in OpenAI) and Arm (majority owned by SoftBank) are Stargate’s initial lead technology partners. Oracle, Nvidia and OpenAI “will closely collaborate to build and operate [Stargate’s] computing system. This builds on a deep collaboration between OpenAI and Nvidia going back to 2016 and a newer partnership between OpenAI and Oracle,” noted the ChatGPT company. “This also builds on the existing OpenAI partnership with Microsoft. OpenAI will continue to increase its consumption of Azure as OpenAI continues its work with Microsoft with this additional compute to train leading models and deliver great products and services.”
The move is another massive boost for the US tech sector and will provide yet more potential business for the country’s long-distance network operators, such as Lumen Technologies and Zayo, as these new datacentres will need massive data connectivity pipes. News of the Stargate investment coincided with an announcement from Zayo that it “intends to build more than 5,000 long-haul fibre route miles to meet the growing demands of AI workloads”.
– Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV
This post was originally published on here
