You've probably heard the name "Stargate" and thought of 90s sci-fi, wormholes, or maybe those old CIA psychic experiments. But in 2026, the Stargate AI project is something much more tangible—and frankly, a lot more expensive. We are talking about a $500 billion bet on the future of human intelligence.
It’s not just a big computer. It’s basically the Manhattan Project of our era, except instead of splitting atoms, they’re trying to stitch together enough silicon and electricity to wake up a digital god.
What is Stargate AI project exactly?
Honestly, it's a massive infrastructure play. At its core, the Stargate AI project is a joint venture officially launched in early 2025 by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and the Abu Dhabi-backed investment firm MGX. While Microsoft was the original partner back when "Stargate" was just a $100 billion codename in a leaked memo, the project has since ballooned into a $500 billion behemoth.
The goal? To build a network of "AI Superfactories" across the United States. They aren't just building data centers to host your emails or cat videos. These are monolithic entities designed for one thing: training and running Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
The flagship site in Abilene, Texas, is already up and running. If you drove past it, you wouldn't just see a warehouse. You’d see a facility sucking down over a gigawatt of power—enough to run a small city. And that’s just phase one.
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Why the name Stargate?
Sam Altman and the folks at OpenAI didn’t pick the name by accident. In the movies, a Stargate is a portal to another world. For them, this project is the portal to a "post-intelligence" world. It’s a bit dramatic, sure, but when you’re spending half a trillion dollars, I guess you’re allowed a little flair.
The Nuts and Bolts: Millions of Chips and 10 Gigawatts
To understand the scale of the Stargate AI project, you have to look at the hardware. We aren't talking about a few thousand GPUs. We are talking about millions.
- The Silicon: It’s a mix of everything. You’ve got NVIDIA’s Blackwell and Vera Rubin architectures, but also custom stuff. Microsoft has thrown its "Maia" and "Braga" chips into the mix, and SoftBank is leveraging Arm’s designs.
- The Power: They are aiming for 10 gigawatts of capacity by 2030. That is an insane amount of juice. To get there, they aren't just plugging into the local grid; they’re looking at dedicated nuclear reactors and massive on-site battery storage.
- The Cooling: You can't cool a million chips with a desk fan. These facilities use "closed-loop liquid cooling." They pipe chilled liquid directly onto the chips. In places like Texas, they’ve had to figure out how to do this with "zero-water evaporation" so they don't drain the local supply.
It’s a massive engineering headache. Microsoft and OpenAI actually had to move away from standard InfiniBand networking because it couldn't handle the scale. They're now building a custom Ethernet fabric just to keep all those chips talking to each other without a lag.
Where is all this stuff being built?
They are spreading these "Superfactories" across the U.S. to avoid breaking the national power grid in one go. Besides Abilene, they’ve broken ground or announced sites in:
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- Shackelford County and Milam County, Texas
- Doña Ana County, New Mexico
- Lordstown, Ohio (where SoftBank bought an old Foxconn facility)
- Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin
There’s even a "Stargate UAE" in Abu Dhabi and a hydropower-fed facility in Norway. It’s a global footprint, but the heart of the project remains firmly in the American dirt.
The Trump Connection
Interestingly, the project got a massive boost from the White House in early 2025. President Trump basically called it the "largest infrastructure project in history" and used emergency declarations to fast-track the permits. Why? Because whoever wins the AGI race essentially wins the 21st century. It’s a national security thing now.
Is this actually going to work?
Look, there’s a lot of skepticism. Elon Musk, who usually loves big, crazy projects, actually doubted they could find the funding. He was wrong—the money is there, mostly coming from SoftBank’s debt-heavy pockets and Middle Eastern sovereign wealth.
But the "thermal wall" is real. If they can’t keep these things cool, they just become very expensive space heaters. And then there's the software. All this hardware is useless if OpenAI can't actually build a model that knows what to do with it. We’ve seen GPT-5 and beyond, but the jump to true AGI—a machine that can reason like a human—is still the big "if."
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Actionable Insights for the AI Era
So, what does the Stargate AI project mean for you? Unless you're an electrical engineer or a GPU architect, you probably aren't building these centers. But you are living in the world they are creating.
- Watch the Energy Sector: Companies involved in small modular reactors (SMRs) and grid infrastructure are the secret beneficiaries of this project.
- Skill Up for "Orchestration": As compute becomes cheap and massive, the value shifts from "knowing things" to "knowing how to direct the AI."
- Monitor Local Impact: If you live in one of the targeted states, these projects bring thousands of jobs but also put a massive strain on local water and power.
The Stargate project is moving fast. By the end of 2026, we’ll likely see the first models trained entirely on this new infrastructure. Whether that brings us a digital utopia or just a very smart chatbot remains to be seen.
Next Steps for You:
If you want to track the physical progress of these sites, keep an eye on federal energy permit filings in Texas and Ohio. These documents often leak the actual hardware counts and power requirements months before the companies make a flashy announcement. You can also monitor the "Water Usage Effectiveness" (WUE) ratings of new data centers in your region to see if they are adopting the Stargate-style closed-loop systems.