Stargate hits 7 GW, $400B as OpenAI, Oracle lock in 5 new sites

The Stargate project just got a lot more concrete. OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank are adding five new U.S. data center sites, pushing planned capacity to nearly 7 gigawatts and locking in over $400 billion in investment over the next three years. When the $500 billion, 10-gigawatt project was announced at the White House in January, it sounded ambitious. Now it’s running ahead of schedule, with the full commitment expected to be secured by the end of 2025.

Three of the new sites — in Shackelford County, Texas; Doña Ana County, New Mexico; and an unnamed Midwest location — fall under a July agreement between OpenAI and Oracle to develop up to 4.5 gigawatts of additional capacity. That deal alone represents more than $300 billion over five years. Throw in a potential 600-megawatt expansion near the flagship Abilene campus, and those sites can deliver over 5.5 gigawatts. The companies expect the buildout to create more than 25,000 onsite jobs. Another two sites, in Lordstown, Ohio and Milam County, Texas, are being developed through a SoftBank-OpenAI partnership and can scale to 1.5 gigawatts over the next 18 months. SoftBank has already broken ground in Ohio, targeting operations next year.

What’s notable here isn’t just the scale — it’s the speed. Oracle began delivering the first NVIDIA GB200 racks to the Abilene site in June, and early training and inference workloads are already running. Sam Altman framed the urgency directly: “AI can only fulfill its promise if we build the compute to power it.” Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk pointed to “unrivaled pace” in expanding OCI’s footprint, while SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son name-checked Arm and energy expertise as key pieces of the puzzle.

The site selection process itself reveals how much political and economic weight these projects carry. The consortium reviewed over 300 proposals from more than 30 states. That’s a lot of local governments angling for a piece of what’s effectively a new industrial base for AI. The administration’s fingerprints are all over this too — the companies explicitly credited Trump’s policies for accelerating timelines and attracting additional partners. Whether that pace holds through construction, permitting, and grid interconnection is the real test. Seven gigawatts on paper is one thing. Steel in the ground and transformers humming is another.