OpenAI’s Stargate ambitions are becoming a physical infrastructure project in Texas. The company has announced a partnership with Oracle to develop 4.5 gigawatts of additional data center capacity for its Stargate AI infrastructure platform in the US.
The expansion, which TechCrunch reports is part of a $30 billion-per-year deal between OpenAI and Oracle, would bring OpenAI’s total Stargate capacity under development to over 5 gigawatts. That number is not just a planning target. It represents the electrical power the data centers are expected to consume when fully operational.
Why Abilene is central to the project
The data center has taken root in Abilene, Texas, a city of 127,000 located 150 miles west of Fort Worth. The city serves as the commercial hub of a 19-county region known as the “Big Country.”
According to the source article, Abilene offers a location with an existing tech employment ecosystem, including Dyess Air Force Base and three universities. The city’s economy has also shifted over time from agricultural and livestock roots toward technology and manufacturing sectors.
That local context matters because Stargate is not only a computing project. It also depends on construction, operations, manufacturing, services, and the surrounding workforce that can support a facility of this scale.
What OpenAI and Oracle are adding
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described the deal on X as an infrastructure project whose scale can be easy to underestimate. He wrote, “We have signed a deal for an additional 4.5 gigawatts of capacity with oracle as part of stargate. easy to throw around numbers, but this is a gigantic infrastructure project.”
Altman also wrote, “We are planning to significantly expand the ambitions of stargate past the $500 billion commitment we announced in January.”
The new agreement builds on OpenAI’s initial $500 billion commitment announced at the White House in January to invest in 10 gigawatts of AI infrastructure over four years. OpenAI estimates that the 4.5 GW expansion will generate jobs across construction and operations roles. Those include direct full-time positions, short-term construction work, and indirect manufacturing and service jobs.
The scale of the electricity demand is one of the clearest ways to understand the size of the undertaking. The 5 gigawatts of total capacity refers to the power these data centers will consume when fully operational. The source article compares that to enough power for roughly 4.4 million American homes.
Stargate’s path from skepticism to partial operation
When OpenAI announced Stargate in January, the plan drew skepticism over whether the company and its partners could support such an ambitious funding promise. Elon Musk wrote on X that “They don’t actually have the money,” and claimed that “SoftBank has well under $10B secured.”
Tech writer and frequent OpenAI critic Ed Zitron also questioned OpenAI’s financial position, pointing to the company’s $5 billion in losses in 2024. “This company loses $5bn+ a year! So what, they raise $19bn for Stargate, then what, another $10bn just to be able to survive?” Zitron wrote on Bluesky at the time.
Six months later, the Abilene data center has moved from construction to partial operation. Oracle began delivering Nvidia GB200 racks to the facility last month, and OpenAI says it has started running early training and inference workloads. OpenAI describes those workloads as supporting “next-generation frontier research.”
How the Stargate plan evolved
Although the White House announcement with President Trump took place in January, the Stargate concept dates back to March 2024. At that time, Microsoft and OpenAI partnered on a $100 billion supercomputer as part of a five-phase plan.
The plan later evolved into its current form as a partnership with Oracle, SoftBank, and CoreWeave. The latest Oracle agreement shows that Stargate is shifting from a broad AI infrastructure concept into a set of large facilities, power commitments, hardware deliveries, and operational workloads.
OpenAI framed the latest deal as part of a broader effort to support AI development. In its press release, the company wrote, “Stargate is an ambitious undertaking designed to meet the historic opportunity in front of us.” It added that the opportunity is coming to life through support from “partners, governments, and investors worldwide,” including leadership from the White House.
The practical takeaway is straightforward: the AI race is increasingly an infrastructure race. For OpenAI, Stargate now means more than model development. It means power capacity, data center construction, hardware supply, local labor, and partnerships capable of turning a national-scale plan into operating compute.