OpenAI is planning to build five new data centers in the United States as part of the Stargate initiative, the company announced on Tuesday. The sites, which are being developed in partnership with Oracle and SoftBank, bring Stargate’s current planned capacity to nearly 7 gigawatts—roughly the same amount of power as seven large-scale nuclear reactors.
“AI is different from the internet in a lot of ways, but one of them is just how much infrastructure it takes,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during a press briefing in Abilene, Texas on Tuesday. He argued that the US “cannot fall behind on this” and the “innovative spirit” of Texas provides a model for how to scale “bigger, faster, cheaper, better.”
Three of the new sites, in Shackelford County, Texas, Doña Ana County, New Mexico, and a yet-to-be disclosed location in the Midwest, are being developed in partnership with Oracle. The move follows an agreement Oracle and OpenAI announced in July to develop up to 4.5 gigawatts of US data center capacity on top of what the two companies are already building at the first Stargate facility in Abilene.
OpenAI claims the new data centers, along with a planned 600 megawatt expansion of the Abilene site, will create more than 25,000 onsite jobs, though the number of workers required to build data centers typically dwarfs the amount needed to maintain them afterwards.
The two remaining sites are being helmed by OpenAI and SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary that develops solar and battery projects. These are located in Lordstown, Ohio and Milam County, Texas.
Stargate is one of several major US technology infrastructure projects that have been announced since President Donald Trump took office at the start of the year. OpenAI said in January that the $500 billion, 10 gigawatt commitment between the ChatGPT maker, SoftBank, Oracle and MGX would “secure American leadership in AI” and “create hundreds of thousands of American jobs.”
Trump touted the mammoth initiative just two days after he returned to the White House, promising that it would accelerate American progress in artificial intelligence and help the US compete against China and other nations. In July, Trump announced an AI action plan that called for speedy infrastructure development and limited red tape as the US tries to beat other countries in the quest for advanced AI. “We believe we’re in an AI race,” White House AI czar David Sacks said at the time. “We want the United States to win that race.”
OpenAI initially framed Stargate as a “new company” that would be chaired by Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son. Now, however, executives close to the project say it’s an umbrella brand name used to refer to all of OpenAI’s data center projects—except those developed in partnership with Microsoft.
The flagship site in Abilene is primarily owned and operated by Oracle, with OpenAI acting as the primary tenant, according to executives close to the project. The buildout, which is being managed by the data center startup Crusoe, is on track to be completed by mid 2026, sources close to the project say. It is already running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and supporting OpenAI training and inference workloads, those sources add.
