Oracle has reportedly purchased about 400,000 Nvidia GB200 AI chips, worth about $40 billion, for deployment in Abilene, Texas. According to the Financial Times, this site will be the first to host the U.S. Stargate project —a $500 billion investment in AI infrastructure by OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund MGX that President Trump announced earlier this year.
Upon completion, the site is estimated to deliver up to 1.2 gigawatts of computing power, making it one of the most powerful data centers in the world and competing against Elon Musk’s Colossus in Memphis, Tennessee.
The project’s ownership is a bit complicated, though. The Abilene site is owned by Cruso, an AI infrastructure company, and Blue Owl Capital, a U.S. investment firm. Both have poured over $15 billion into the site through debt and equity financing.
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The AI data center campus is approximately 875 acres and will have eight buildings. Construction began in June last year. Oracle will lease the Abilene site for 15 years, where it will deploy these AI chips. It will then lease this massive computing power to OpenAI, allowing it to use the AI chips to train its next-generation AI LLMs.
OpenAI has solely relied on Microsoft’s data centers for its computer power needs. However, it has since become frustrated with the setup, because the former’s demand was greater than what the latter could supply. So, the two decided to terminate their exclusive contract, allowing the AI pioneer to partner with other organizations for its processing power demands.
Interestingly, all these talks on equity and investments are commitments by the individual companies—the Financial Times said that Stargate itself has yet to commit any amount to a data center. Nevertheless, OpenAI recently also announced Stargate UAE, where it plans to deploy a 1GB cluster in Abu Dhabi in coordination with the U.S. government. The 5 GW data center will be built by G42 and is envisioned to utilize more than 2 million Nvidia GB200 chips.
All these AI data center deployments have helped Nvidia become one of the most valuable companies in the world, with Team Green hitting the number one spot (again) in late 2024. Aside from this $40 billion Oracle order, there has also been news that Elon Musk is raising cash to build Colossus 2, featuring a million GPUs. Other tech giants and even governments are trying to get in on the bandwagon, pushing the demand for the latest, most powerful AI chip through the roof.
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