Stargate datacentre breaks ground
Construction has begun in Texas on “Stargate,” a large AI datacentre project backed by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and Crusoe, described as one of the biggest AI data‑centre complexes in the world. The reporting highlights the project’s scale in energy, jobs and physical infrastructure rather than model development alone, and frames it as a new kind of capital-intensive node in the AI stack. (infobae.com)
Construction is underway in Abilene, Texas, on Stargate, the first big campus in OpenAI’s planned United States artificial intelligence infrastructure buildout. (openai.com) OpenAI said on January 21, 2025 that Stargate would invest up to $500 billion over four years in United States infrastructure, with SoftBank as financial lead and OpenAI as operational lead, alongside Oracle and MGX. Crusoe is building the Abilene site on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. (openai.com) (crusoe.ai) Crusoe said it began work at the Abilene campus in June 2024 with an initial phase of two buildings totaling more than 200 megawatts, then expanded the plan to eight buildings and 1.2 gigawatts. The company said the first phase covered 980,000 square feet. (crusoe.ai 1) (crusoe.ai 2) An artificial intelligence data center is a warehouse-sized power plant for computing: rows of chips, cooling gear, and networking equipment that train models and run services after release. OpenAI said the Abilene site is part of a push toward 10 gigawatts of United States capacity, and later said Stargate had moved ahead of schedule toward that target. (openai.com 1) (openai.com 2) That scale has turned the story from software into industrial construction. OpenAI said in September 2025 that Stargate’s first six sites, including Abilene, represented nearly 7 gigawatts of planned capacity and more than $400 billion of investment over three years. (openai.com) The Abilene campus also shows how much electricity and hardware these projects need. Crusoe said each of the eight buildings is designed to support up to 50,000 NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 systems on one network fabric, and OpenAI said Stargate projects under development with Oracle would run more than 2 million chips. (crusoe.ai) (openai.com) The job claims are also being made at local scale. Crusoe said the Development Corporation of Abilene estimated roughly $1 billion in direct and indirect economic impact over 20 years from the first two buildings alone, with larger effects possible as the campus grows to eight buildings. (crusoe.ai) The project’s ownership and customer picture has shifted as construction continued. In March 2026, Crusoe said it was developing a separate 900 megawatt Abilene campus for Microsoft next to its existing infrastructure, bringing the full site to about 2.1 gigawatts, after reports that Oracle and OpenAI had dropped one planned expansion. (crusoe.ai) (datacenterdynamics.com) Texas lawmakers are now weighing what the broader boom means for the grid and local communities as more campuses are proposed. In that sense, Stargate is no longer just an OpenAI project in Abilene; it is part of a statewide buildout of power-hungry industrial sites tied to artificial intelligence demand. (msn.com)
