Donald Trump to unveil $100bn AI infrastructure investment

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Donald Trump is set to unveil a billion-dollar private investment in a massive new artificial intelligence infrastructure initiative backed by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle.

Dubbed Stargate, the joint venture was poised to receive an initial cash injection of $100 billion from the tech giants, rising to $500 billion over the next four years, two people familiar with the matter said.

Microsoft was also involved in the project as a technology partner, one of the people said on Tuesday.

Stargate will be announced by the president at the White House on Tuesday afternoon, with SoftBank chief Masayoshi Son, OpenAI boss Sam Altman and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison in attendance.

The plans, which were first reported by CBS News, see tech executives court Trump, who began a second term in the White House on Monday surrounded by many of the industry’s biggest names.

Stargate aims to enhance new training and execution capabilities A.I It will initially build one data center project in Texas before the model expands to other states, people briefed on the plan said.

OpenAI declined to comment, while Microsoft, Oracle and SoftBank did not respond to requests for comment. Other investors and technology partners are also expected to join the project.

As the rapid development of AI systems over the past two years has stretched American infrastructure, data centers have emerged as a particular bottleneck. Sophisticated models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Cloud Chatbot require large amounts of data and computing power to train and run.

It has spurred discussions among AI executives, their commercial partners and governments about improving national infrastructure.

Earlier this month, Hussain Sajwani, chairman of Dubai-based property developer Damac, announced plans to invest at least $20 billion in US data centers during a meeting with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

Leading figures in the AI ​​sector, including OpenAI’s Altman, have argued that better infrastructure is essential for AI models to develop to the next stage and to compete with China for technology dominance.

Altman said earlier this month that the Trump administration could boost domestic AI companies with “US-made infrastructure and lots of it.”

“What I really deeply agree with the president about is how difficult it has become to build things in the United States. Power plants, data centers, anything like that,” he told Bloomberg. said in an interview.

In his inaugural address on Monday, Trump promised that the United States was on the brink of an “exciting new era of national achievement,” though he did not make any specific mention of AI technology.

Last month, Trump called for a separate SoftBank 100 billion dollar investment commitment “A monumental display of confidence in America’s future” in the United States. It was not clear whether the Stargate investment would be part of SoftBank’s earlier commitments.

Additional reporting by Rafe Uddin and Alex Rogers