Latest news with #SoftBank
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First Post
5 hours ago
- Business
- First Post
No takers for Trump's $500 bn data centre project; unveiled in Jan, Stargate has completed no deal
The Stargate Project launched with presidential fanfare and billion-dollar pledges, but six months later, it has no data centres and little to show for its promise read more (File) An aerial view shows construction underway on a Project Stargate AI infrastructure site, a collaboration between three large tech companies – OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle - in Abilene, Texas, US, April 23, 2025. Reuters In January this year, the Stargate Project emerged with a sweeping promise: a $500 billion investment in AI infrastructure intended to cement US dominance in artificial intelligence, create hundreds of thousands of jobs and serve national security. Spearheaded by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and MGX—launched with great fanfare at the White House alongside President Donald Trump—the initiative was positioned as the most ambitious tech infrastructure plan in American history. But six months on, the ambitious programme has yet to secure a single major data centre deal, according to The Wall Street Journal. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Early pledges, delayed action At its inception, Stargate projected a rapid deployment of $100 billion and plans for 10 gigawatts of computing capacity spread across multiple massive data centres. However, insiders now say those goals have been drastically scaled back, The Wall Street Journal report said. The new, much-reduced target involves the construction of a single, smaller facility—possibly in Ohio by the end of 2025. The delay stems from disagreements between the project's lead partners, OpenAI and SoftBank, especially over where to locate the data centres and how to implement them. Conflicting visions between partners While both companies publicly maintain a united front, tensions reportedly simmer behind the scenes. Sam Altman of OpenAI and Masayoshi Son of SoftBank have diverged on key elements, including site selection and whether to rely on SoftBank-backed SB Energy properties. OpenAI has pressed ahead on other infrastructure deals independently, most notably a separate arrangement with Oracle that bypasses SoftBank altogether. That deal alone involves building 4.5 gigawatts of data centre capacity, triple what Stargate was expected to deliver in the near term. OpenAI finds alternative routes Even as Stargate stalls, OpenAI has not slowed its pursuit of infrastructure expansion. Its partnership with Oracle includes massive power and compute capabilities spread across US locations, reportedly consuming as much energy as two Hoover Dams. Coupled with earlier agreements like one with CoreWeave, OpenAI has already nearly matched the 5 gigawatts of capacity initially tied to Stargate's $100 billion rollout. This suggests OpenAI is building its AI infrastructure with or without Stargate's formal structure in place. SoftBank's high stakes gamble Masayoshi Son remains committed to the vision, despite Stargate's stumbling start. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Japanese billionaire say he is still bullish on OpenAI and even interested in increasing his investment. Earlier this year, SoftBank committed a record-setting $30 billion to OpenAI—a move that pushed the company to sell assets and take on additional debt. For Son, the Stargate project is not just a financial venture but a strategic attempt to finally cement SoftBank's relevance in the AI revolution after missing early bets on major players like OpenAI and facing high profile failures in other sectors. Elon Musk recently weighed in on the project's faltering momentum. Responding to social media speculation about the delays, Musk remarked, 'They simply don't,' referencing earlier claims that SoftBank lacks the necessary funds. Musk had previously suggested that SoftBank had secured less than $10 billion of the $500 billion required—a claim that reignited debate over the project's financial grounding. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Public posturing versus private realities In a recent SoftBank event, both Son and Altman made a public appearance via video, reaffirming their commitment to building 10 gigawatts of AI data centres. Altman described it as a 'wonderful partnership,' and both parties issued a joint statement promising that they were 'moving at hyperscale and speed'. However, such optimistic messaging contrasts with the reality that, as of mid-2025, Stargate has not finalised even one major data centre agreement. From acquiring land and energy to sourcing high-performance chips and managing financing, the process is slow and capital-intensive. Stargate's own teams are said to be evaluating new, lower-cost designs for their proposed Ohio facility, but no formal construction has begun. Oracle's CEO Safra Catz confirmed on a recent investor call that Stargate had not yet been formally established as a legal entity, casting further doubt on its operational status. Political spotlight President Trump's administration had touted Stargate as a symbol of America's resurgence in technological leadership. With its White House launch, the project was strategically positioned to highlight Trump's commitment to economic growth, innovation and job creation. But the delays in execution are now raising questions about the project's feasibility. Despite repeated assurances of urgency, Stargate's progress does not appear to align with the administration's timelines or rhetoric. The Trump administration has even declared a national energy emergency to remove regulatory barriers. Yet Stargate, meant to be the flagship of this national push, has not delivered as expected. A vanishing dream? While Stargate's immediate ambitions have shrunk dramatically, those involved insist the long-term vision remains intact. OpenAI, for its part, continues to emphasise the need for large-scale investment in compute infrastructure, describing it as essential for advancing toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). Some elements of the original vision have taken shape albeit outside Stargate's framework. In Abilene, Texas, where Oracle and OpenAI have already begun development, Nvidia AI hardware has been delivered and early-stage training is underway. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD The site has generated thousands of construction and support jobs, offering a glimpse of what Stargate aspired to achieve. Yet these successes are largely independent of SoftBank exposing the fragmentation of what was once pitched as a unified mega-project. Stargate was conceived as a moonshot, combining public support, private capital and cutting-edge technology to catapult the US into AI supremacy. Six months later, the reality appears far messier. Whether Stargate eventually fulfills its bold promise remains unclear. The venture, for now, stands as a symbol of the tension between a much-touted ambition and the slow, tangled grind of implementation.
Axios
5 hours ago
- Business
- Axios
OpenAI's data center ambitions collide with reality
OpenAI is finding that financing and building the massive data centers it needs to meet its ambitions is easier said than done. Why it matters: There's no limit on AI builders' hunger for computing capacity. Many advances in generative AI have come from dramatically boosting the computing power applies to model training, while new approaches and increased adoption mean that running those models demands more and more data centers, too. Driving the news: The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that OpenAI has run into conflicts and stumbles in its relationship with SoftBank, a key partner in its effort to dramatically scale up its access to computing capacity. The companies pledged in January that they would immediately invest $100 billion. But no specific deals have yet been inked and near-term ambitions have been scaled back, with this year likely to yield only work on a single small U.S. data center, likely in Ohio, per the WSJ. The Journal said other differences have cropped up in the six months since Sam Altman, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son and Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison announced their plans with President Trump in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Yes, but: OpenAI announced Tuesday an expansion of its work with Oracle that will see the pair build a further 4.5 gigawatts of capacity on top of an 800-megawatt project already under development in Abilene, Texas. "With this deal, we expect we will exceed the $500 billion commitment we announced at the White House 6 months ago; we are now working to expand that with Oracle, SoftBank, Microsoft, and others," Sam Altman told OpenAI employees Monday in a memo seen by Axios. What they're saying: Altman acknowledged in the employee memo that the company's thirst for computing is "starting to strain the supply chain" and will "require some real creativity." Zoom in: OpenAI, which once relied solely on partner and investor Microsoft, has been partnering with an array of different companies and governments to get more processing power. Its OpenAI for Countries project, announced in May, aims to bring various nations into the mix as partners. It signed its first such deal in May with the United Arab Emirates. As part of OpenAI for Countries, partners will also agree to invest in U.S. projects — helping the company fund yet more data centers here. OpenAI's chief strategy officer Jason Kwon traveled across Asia for three weeks meeting with governments and potential investors in India, Singapore, Korea and other countries, though no additional deals have yet been announced. OpenAI is even turning to rival Google for compute capacity. Altman reassured employees in his memo that additional capacity is coming sooner rather than later. He noted that the company expects to have the equivalent of 2 million Nvidia A100 processors available for use by the end of August and then roughly double that capacity by the end of the year. Between the lines: It's not easy to keep tabs on all the different data center projects OpenAI has announced in recent months. The company has used the Stargate name to describe a number of next-generation data center efforts, but various projects under that banner involve different partners. For example, its Middle East project is dubbed Stargate UAE and involves Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco, SoftBank and G42, a Middle East-based AI startup backed by Microsoft and others. The new project announced Tuesday is also dubbed Stargate, though SoftBank (which actually registered the Stargate trademark) isn't a part of the effort. The big picture: OpenAI isn't the only company with big needs. Global data center capacity is seen growing by 23% per year through 2030, according to a Morgan Stanley report. Much of that growth is being spurred by a handful of big players, including Meta, Google, Microsoft and xAI. Elon Musk said Tuesday that his xAI company has 230,000 GPUs, including 30,000 of Nvidia's GB200, up and running for training Grok in its first Colossus supercluster. Musk said the first batch of a planned 550,000 high-end Nvidia chips, also for training models, will come online in a few weeks. xAI relies on cloud providers to handle running Grok. Anthropic, meanwhile, is acknowledging that meeting its data center needs will require the company to show more flexibility in choosing its partners, including taking money from Middle East governments. "Unfortunately, I think 'No bad person should ever benefit from our success' is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on," Amodei said in a memo to staff, per Wired. The bottom line: All the companies chasing AI with superhuman capabilities say they will need ever more money, more electricity and more processing power. "We must continue to get more ambitious about compute; we want to bring lots of AI to lots of people," Altman said in his memo. "It's very clear to me how powerful it's going to be to have AI working for you all of the time and helping you accomplish your goals in all sorts of ways."
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
OpenAI's skyrocketing spending could see billions of dollars in silicon headed down the AI mines in the next few years, including 2 million Nvidia chips headed to Texas Stargate facility
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. OpenAI consumes compute capacity like few have ever done before it. A recent report expects it to gorge itself on datacentre capacity and research between 2025 and 2030—burning cash at a rate of swimming pools per minute by some estimations. The Information reports that OpenAI is chasing fresh investment to allow it to expand its compute capability—buying new graphics cards, accelerators, and processors to jumpstart new AI models. The company is said to be spending around $13 billion on Microsoft-owned datacentres this year, which could rise to around $28 billion in 2028. But the love affair with Microsoft is not set to last. OpenAI says one key investor, Japan's SoftBank, could be providing $30 billion of a hopeful $40 billion it hopes to raise in coming months, with a large amount of that cash headed toward Stargate. Stargate isn't as cool as it sounds and has nothing to do with space-age Egyptian folk. It's a plan between OpenAI, Softbank, and Oracle to build out AI infrastructure in the US. As much as $500 billion worth over four years. The first site for development is in Abilene, Texas. It's called Stargate 1, and the first Nvidia GB200 racks are being installed and already running 'early' workloads at the facility. Just today, OpenAI and Oracle inked a deal to develop over 5 gigawatts of capacity at the site, which is nearly five-fold its initial expected capacity and will incorporate… 2 million chips. OpenAI isn't footing the bill for that joint venture, which has attracted investment from the company's partners, though still needs to raise more cash. All told, The Information projects OpenAI will end up burning through as much as $20 billion in cash flow in 2027, up from $2 billion in 2024. Its fees for researching and developing new models could raise up to as much as $40 billion starting in 2028. Overall, The Information projects the company will spend something like $320 billion between 2025 and 2030. Further to all of this wild internal spending, OpenAI also has the risk of further unplanned spending in the case of, well, court cases. AI companies are under constant and historical scrutiny for their use of copyright materials in training data. The UK government has waved away many complaints by artists and passed a bill that would allow some degree of usage for copyrighted materials in training AI. Not cool. Though OpenAI is facing a slew of cases in the US by authors, and The New York Times has sued the company for use of its articles in training data, too. Similar cases are ongoing against other AI providers, such as Anthropic, and Meta has already won an early case fighting over similar grounds Whether there'll be hell to pay, that's up to the judge in each case—that's just one judge for the copyright cases put forward by US authors, as the cases are now being consolidated. OpenAI has stated in response to the authors' cases that it believes its "models are trained on publicly available data, grounded in fair use, and supportive of innovation." Though admittedly these cases and any repercussions are unlikely to matter to OpenAI's bottom line either way. It's projected to earn up to $12.7 billion this year, according to The Information, and it's already roughly around the $10 billion mark, reports Reuters. That isn''t anywhere near its expenses but, hey, it's not entirely footing the bill itself. You'd think there'd be some cash spare to pay some of those rights holders too, but alas…
Economic Times
8 hours ago
- Automotive
- Economic Times
Japan's tariff relief sends positive signal to global markets: Steve Englander
"I think that the markets seem to be relieved that the worst has not hit. It also seems that the auto sector got itself like 15% tariffs which is a bit better than many were expecting," says Steve Englander, Standard Chartered Bank. ADVERTISEMENT First up, the biggest news for morning today is the news coming in on, of course, tariff. There is finally some news that has come out, with Japan they have struck a deal. It is the way the market is reacting especially the Nikkei has jumped up. It seems like investors had gotten way too pessimistic and the fact that this deal has come out it is a win-win for us because they are getting an investment of $550 billion, they will get 90% of the profits and from what we hear Trump is really expecting planned investments from players like SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and so it is a win-win for us but what does it mean for Japan and also the other emerging markets for the deals to come? Steve Englander: Well, in the short term it removes some of the risk premium that was weighing on Japanese asset markets. So, we have seen the Nikkei take a big jump and even Japanese bond yields have gone up, in this case not because of inflation or activity concerns, but kind of dragged up by equities. So, I think that the markets seem to be relieved that the worst has not hit. It also seems that the auto sector got itself like 15% tariffs which is a bit better than many were expecting. I would say that some of the other stuff is a little bit soft. I mean, promises to invest direct investment, sometimes they come to fruition, sometimes they do not. They always take a while. But I think that is going to set a pattern for other major economies to try and bargain down some of the reciprocal tariffs in return for direct investment and that seems to be acceptable to the US. But any particular segments where you feel the impact is going to be felt more than the others? Steve Englander: Well, in Japan there is always a focus on autos and steel and there are some headlines that suggest that steel and aluminium are not going to get the break that autos are. So, we will have to see if those headlines are true or not. There is also discussion of opening up of Japanese auto and some agricultural markets. We will have to see how much of that actually occurs as well. But I would say that one implication is that it puts pressure on other countries, Japan's competitors for US markets to come to similar deals with the US because now that Japan is kind of in the clear, they do not want to run the risk that they get hit with harsher tariffs if no deals arrive. (You can now subscribe to our ETMarkets WhatsApp channel)
Time of India
8 hours ago
- Automotive
- Time of India
Japan's tariff relief sends positive signal to global markets: Steve Englander
"I think that the markets seem to be relieved that the worst has not hit. It also seems that the auto sector got itself like 15% tariffs which is a bit better than many were expecting," says Steve Englander , Standard Chartered Bank . First up, the biggest news for morning today is the news coming in on, of course, tariff. There is finally some news that has come out, with Japan they have struck a deal. It is the way the market is reacting especially the Nikkei has jumped up. It seems like investors had gotten way too pessimistic and the fact that this deal has come out it is a win-win for us because they are getting an investment of $550 billion, they will get 90% of the profits and from what we hear Trump is really expecting planned investments from players like SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and so it is a win-win for us but what does it mean for Japan and also the other emerging markets for the deals to come? Steve Englander: Well, in the short term it removes some of the risk premium that was weighing on Japanese asset markets. So, we have seen the Nikkei take a big jump and even Japanese bond yields have gone up, in this case not because of inflation or activity concerns, but kind of dragged up by equities. So, I think that the markets seem to be relieved that the worst has not hit. It also seems that the auto sector got itself like 15% tariffs which is a bit better than many were expecting. I would say that some of the other stuff is a little bit soft. I mean, promises to invest direct investment, sometimes they come to fruition, sometimes they do not. They always take a while. But I think that is going to set a pattern for other major economies to try and bargain down some of the reciprocal tariffs in return for direct investment and that seems to be acceptable to the US. Explore courses from Top Institutes in Please select course: Select a Course Category CXO Others Finance Digital Marketing others Data Analytics Project Management MCA Design Thinking Leadership Operations Management MBA Artificial Intelligence Management Cybersecurity Public Policy Degree PGDM Product Management Data Science Data Science healthcare Technology Healthcare Skills you'll gain: Customer-Centricity & Brand Strategy Product Marketing, Distribution, & Analytics Digital Strategies & Innovation Skills Leadership Insights & AI Integration Expertise Duration: 10 Months IIM Kozhikode IIMK Chief Marketing and Growth Officer Starts on Apr 7, 2024 Get Details Skills you'll gain: Digital Strategy Development Expertise Emerging Technologies & Digital Trends Data-driven Decision Making Leadership in the Digital Age Duration: 40 Weeks Indian School of Business ISB Chief Digital Officer Starts on Jun 30, 2024 Get Details Skills you'll gain: Operations Strategy for Business Excellence Organizational Transformation Corporate Communication & Crisis Management Capstone Project Presentation Duration: 11 Months IIM Lucknow Chief Operations Officer Programme Starts on Jun 30, 2024 Get Details Skills you'll gain: Technology Strategy & Innovation Emerging Technologies & Digital Transformation Leadership in Technology Management Cybersecurity & Risk Management Duration: 24 Weeks Indian School of Business ISB Chief Technology Officer Starts on Jun 28, 2024 Get Details by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Villas For Sale in Dubai Might Surprise You Villas In Dubai | Search Ads Get Rates Undo But any particular segments where you feel the impact is going to be felt more than the others? Steve Englander: Well, in Japan there is always a focus on autos and steel and there are some headlines that suggest that steel and aluminium are not going to get the break that autos are. So, we will have to see if those headlines are true or not. There is also discussion of opening up of Japanese auto and some agricultural markets. We will have to see how much of that actually occurs as well. But I would say that one implication is that it puts pressure on other countries, Japan's competitors for US markets to come to similar deals with the US because now that Japan is kind of in the clear, they do not want to run the risk that they get hit with harsher tariffs if no deals arrive.
