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Donald Trump is set to unveil billions of dollars of private investment in a massive new artificial intelligence initiative backed by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle.
Called Stargate, the joint venture is poised to receive an initial injection of $100 billion from the tech giants, up to $500 billion over the next four years, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Microsoft was involved in the project as a technology partner, one of the people said on Tuesday.
Stargate will be announced by the president at the White House on Tuesday afternoon, along with SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.
The plans, first reported by CBS News, come as tech executives look to court Trump, who began his second term at the White House on Monday surrounded by big names in the industry.
Stargate aims to increase training capacity and innovation AI models. It will build a data center project in Texas before expanding to other states, people briefed on the plans said.
OpenAI declined to comment, while Microsoft, Oracle and SoftBank did not respond to requests for comment. Other investors and technology partners are also expected to join the project.
The rapid development of AI systems over the past two years has stretched America's infrastructure, with data centers emerging as a particular problem. Low-level models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude chatbots require large amounts of data and computing power to train and operate.
That has spurred discussions among AI executives, their business partners and the government about improving the nation's infrastructure.
At the beginning of this month, Hussain Sajwani, chairman of the Dubai-based developer Damac, announced plans to invest at least $ 20bn in US data centers, in a meeting with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Leading figures in the field of AI, including OpenAI's Altman, have argued that better infrastructure is essential to developing the next level of AI models and competing with China to dominate the technology.
Altman said earlier this month that the Trump administration could promote domestic AI companies “with infrastructure built in the US and many of them”.
“What I agree with the president is, it's amazing how hard it is to build things in America. Power plants, data centers, any kind of things,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg.
In his inaugural address on Monday, Trump promised that the US was on the cusp of a “great new era of national prosperity”, although he did not specifically mention AI technology.
Last month, Trump called SoftBank different promises to invest 100 billion dollars in the US “a great show of confidence in America's future”. It's unclear whether Stargate's investment will be part of SoftBank's previous commitment.
Additional reporting by Rafe Uddin and Alex Rogers