OpenAI said the Stargate initiative, unveiled earlier this year by U.S. President Donald Trump, has an estimated long-term cost of $500 billion
In sum – what you need to know:
OpenAI expands Stargate abroad – The company launched ‘OpenAI for Countries’, offering AI infrastructure partnerships to governments worldwide following interest in replicating its U.S. Stargate model.
Localized AI, global reach – The program will deliver country-specific data centers and ChatGPT services tailored to local languages and cultures.
Stargate gains momentum – With its first $100 billion phase underway in Texas, OpenAI now aims to launch 10 global projects in partnership with governments.
OpenAI recently announced the launch of “OpenAI for Countries,” a new initiative within the Stargate project.
“Our Stargate project, an unprecedented investment in America’s AI infrastructure announced in January with President Trump and our partners Oracle and SoftBank, is now underway with our first supercomputing campus in Abilene, Texas, and more sites to come. We’ve heard from many countries asking for help in building out similar AI infrastructure,” the company said.
In response to government interest, OpenAI said it is offering a new kind of partnership for the AI era. Through formalized infrastructure collaborations and in coordination with the U.S. government, OpenAI will:
– Partner with countries to help build in-country data center capacity. These secure data centers will help support the sovereignty of a country’s data, build new local industries, and make it easy to customize AI and leverage their data in a private and compliant way.
– Provide customized ChatGPT to citizens. This will help deliver improved healthcare and education, more efficient public services and more. This will be AI of, by and for the needs of each particular country, localized in their language and for their culture and respecting future global standards.
– Continue evolving security and safety controls for AI models. As OpenAI’s models become more powerful, the firm will continue to make investments in the processes and controls, including the data center and physical security needed to deploy, operate and protect them.
“Partner countries also would invest in expanding the global Stargate Project—and thus in continued US-led AI leadership and a global, growing network effect for democratic AI. As OpenAI moves forward with OpenAI for Countries, our goal is to pursue 10 projects with individual countries or regions as the first phase of this initiative, and expand from there, the firm said.
The Stargate initiative, unveiled earlier this year by U.S. President Donald Trump, has an estimated long-term cost of $500 billion, and an initial $100 billion already earmarked for early phases.
At its core, Stargate is a plan to build a network of state-of-the-art AI data centers across the United States. These centers will be used to train and run advanced AI models that require huge volumes of computing power. The main goal of the initiative is to create enough capacity and performance to keep up with rapidly increasing demand for AI in everything from scientific research and medicine to automation, defense and financial services.
The project is designed to span multiple locations and phases, potentially becoming the largest AI infrastructure buildout in history. Each phase will add computing capacity, storage, and networking to enable extremely large-scale AI training and inference.
The Stargate project is being led by OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in partnership with SoftBank and Oracle.
OpenAI brings the AI vision and cutting-edge models. SoftBank is providing funding and strategic support.
Oracle is a key infrastructure partner. It will provide cloud computing expertise and manage large parts of the backend architecture needed to run AI workloads at scale.
These companies form the core of the project, but additional partners are expected to join over time — especially energy companies, construction firms and chipmakers.
The AI boom is putting enormous pressure on existing data infrastructure. Large AI models require thousands of GPUs (graphics processing units), advanced cooling systems and huge amounts of electricity — especially for training. Many existing data centers simply can’t keep up with the scale or energy demands of modern AI.
Stargate aims to solve this by creating purpose-built infrastructure from the ground up, designed specifically for AI workloads.