OpenAI, Oracle lock in 4.5 GW Stargate deal to power 2M chips

The Stargate project just got a lot more concrete. OpenAI and Oracle have inked a deal to develop 4.5 gigawatts of additional data center capacity in the U.S., a massive expansion that pushes the joint venture’s total pipeline past the 5 GW mark. That’s enough juice to run over 2 million chips. For context, the original White House announcement in January pegged the ambition at $500 billion and 10 GW over four years. Now OpenAI says they expect to exceed that initial commitment, citing “strong momentum” with partners like Oracle and SoftBank.

This isn’t just a press release flex about watts and servers. The companies estimate the new 4.5 GW buildout alone will generate over 100,000 jobs, spanning everything from specialized electricians and equipment operators to indirect roles in manufacturing and local services. The first Stargate site in Abilene, Texas is already humming. Oracle started delivering Nvidia GB200 racks last month, and OpenAI confirms the facility is now running early training and inference workloads for next-generation frontier research. Workers from more than 20 states are already on the ground.

The Oracle deal is one piece of a bigger puzzle. OpenAI says its partnership with SoftBank is also accelerating, with site assessments underway and a focus on reimagining data center design specifically for advanced AI workloads. There’s also mention of CoreWeave and international infrastructure plays through something called “OpenAI for Countries.” And while Microsoft remains the cloud provider for OpenAI, the Stargate umbrella is clearly designed to reduce reliance on any single partner. It’s a hedging strategy wrapped in an infrastructure moonshot.

Four months ago, Stargate felt like a policy headline. Now it’s got steel in the ground, racks spinning up, and a multi-gigawatt roadmap that’s actually accelerating. The question isn’t whether they can build it. It’s whether the models trained on all this compute will justify the staggering price tag.