OpenAI is set to supercharge its AI compute capacity with a new 4.5 gigawatt expansion in partnership with Oracle, marking a significant step towards its ambition of deploying 10 gigawatts of compute power across the United States.
The expansion, announced Tuesday, will build upon OpenAI’s existing Stargate I facility in Abilene, Texas, pushing the project well beyond the firm’s initial commitment made at the White House in January.
“This is a gigantic infrastructure project,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a post on X, alongside photos of the Abilene site. Altman also noted that over one million GPUs are expected to be operational by the end of the year, joking that the team now needs to figure out how to “100x that.”
The additional Oracle partnership brings Stargate’s development pipeline to more than 5 GW – enough to support over two million AI chips. Altman hinted at broader ambitions, stating that OpenAI plans to scale Stargate significantly beyond its original $500 billion commitment.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk shared a bold vision for his AI company, xAI, revealing plans to bring 50 million units of H100-equivalent compute online within five years. This comes after xAI announced the completion of a $6 billion Series B funding round in May.
According to TeslaPrice, an X user tracking AI chip metrics, this would equate to 500 times the compute power of the world’s most advanced AI supercomputer just a year ago. xAI’s upcoming Colossus 2 supercomputer alone will deploy 550,000 GB200 chips, roughly equivalent to 5.5 million H100s, with Musk aiming for nearly ten times that scale.
The Stargate initiative itself, spearheaded by OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, was first unveiled earlier this year by US President Donald Trump. Envisioned as a $500 billion AI infrastructure project to create over 100,000 jobs and establish advanced AI data centers nationwide, Stargate has recently faced setbacks.
A Wall Street Journal report revealed internal tensions between key partners and delays that have forced the group to scale back immediate plans, now focusing on completing a single data center by year-end instead of the initially promised $100 billion rollout.
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