On Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced a joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank to invest billions of dollars into the United State’s artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Stargate, as it would be called, was jointly revealed at the White House by Trump, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.
The president will initially fund $100 billion into the project, and then invest further to no more than $500 billion in the next four years. Meanwhile, the Stargate project will be set up as a separate company.
Trump aims to keep the AI industry in the U.S. while pointing to China as the country’s main competitor in the emerging industry.
Ellison said Stargate’s first joint venture will be the construction of data centers in Texas, which has already begun.
OpenAI later remarked in an X post that the project would not only support the re-industrialization of the U.S. but also provide a strategic capability for national security for the U.S. and its allies.
As stated in OpenAI’s post, Son will chair Stargate, while semiconductor companies Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI will be its key initial technology partners.
Last December, Son had already pledged $100 billion AI investment in the U.S. when he visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, in which the then-President-elect jokingly pressed SoftBank’s CEO to push his pledge up to $200 billion.
Trump later remarked that the $500 billion investment would be separate from Son’s previous pledge.