OpenAI's First Stargate Site to Hold Up to 400,000 Nvidia Chips
(Bloomberg) -- The first data center complex for OpenAI's $100 billion Stargate infrastructure venture will have space for as many as 400,000 of Nvidia Corp.'s powerful AI chips — an amount that, if filled, would make it one of the largest known clusters of artificial intelligence computing power.
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The construction for the site, in the small Texas city of Abilene, will be completed by mid-2026 with capacity of 1.2 gigawatts of power, according to developer Crusoe, which is set to announce the next phase of development on Tuesday. Though the facility will be large enough to support hundreds of thousands of advanced AI chips, it's unclear how many have been committed to the project.
The Stargate joint venture was unveiled by OpenAI, SoftBank Group Corp. and Oracle Corp. at a White House event in January, with the goal of providing the physical infrastructure needed for more advanced AI models from the ChatGPT maker. OpenAI previously said Stargate will expand to as many as 10 sites around the country.
Oracle has already agreed to use the Abilene location's full build for Stargate, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private information. OpenAI currently has plans to use roughly 1 gigawatt of capacity at the facility, one person said. Crusoe declined to comment on the site's clients. OpenAI declined to comment. Oracle didn't respond to a request for comment.
Stargate joins a race among leading tech companies to build up capacity of Nvidia's latest chips. Elon Musk's xAI recently inked a $5 billion deal with Dell Technologies Inc. for AI servers for a supercomputer in Memphis. Meta Platforms Inc. has said it planned to have computing power equal to 600,000 Nvidia H100s — a previous generation of the company's data center semiconductors — by the end of 2024. And CoreWeave Inc., an AI-focused cloud provider, has more than 250,000 Nvidia graphics processing units across 32 data centers, it said in paperwork for an public offering earlier this month.
While Stargate was formally announced in January, the Abilene data center complex was in the works before that. 'If you came here a year ago, this would be a field of mesquite trees and shrubs,' said Crusoe Chief Executive Officer Chase Lochmiller in an interview. 'We broke ground in June of last year and have been on a very accelerated build pace.'
Currently, there are about 2,000 people working on construction for the project, with plans for that to increase to nearly 5,000 workers, Crusoe said. There will be eight data center buildings, each designed to hold as many as 50,000 Nvidia GB200 semiconductors, the company said.
The White House announcement gave the long in-the-works project 'tremendous credibility,' said Michael McNamara, CEO of energy startup Lancium, which is also developing the site and first inked an agreement with local officials to build a data center campus in Abilene in 2021. There's now a sense among 'all stakeholders that these projects need to be built bigger and faster,' he said.
--With assistance from Shirin Ghaffary.
(Adds more detail on site plans in fourth paragraph.)
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