Inside Stargate with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
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What is the Stargate project and why was it announced right after President Trump’s inauguration?
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I'm here on the streets of Abilene, Texas, asking people if they've heard of something called Stargate. So have you heard of Stargate?
I have.
Have you heard of Stargate? No. Have you heard of Project Stargate? A little bit, not very much. Until recently. I had not.
Yeah, I've heard just a just a smidge about it that it was uh announced by Trump, and that's that's kind of really all that I've heard.
A year ago, if you asked me what Stargate is, I might have said something like Oh yeah, that's an extraterrestrial device that allows interplanetary travel by creating a wormhole between two ring-shaped portals, as depicted in the 1994 film Stargate and the various television spin-offs.
How does she know of the stardate?
But in 2025, Stargate isn't just something you'll hear about from Jaffa Warriors from Chulak. Now it's something you'll hear from a different type of TV personality.
Stargate. So put that name down in your books 'cause I think you're gonna hear a lot about it.
On January twenty-first, President Trump, flanked by Oracle's Larry Ellison, OpenAI Sam Altman, and SoftBank's Masayoshi Sun, announced Stargate, an AI infrastructure project investing a hundred billion dollars in data center development, and a stated intention of investing five hundred billion dollars over the next four years.
That's great that you're coming. In together, that's a massive group of talent and money.
On Fox News, White House прессекретарі Карлан Левт Піч Старгейтва Трімфер Америка and the Trump administration. Президент Трамп єдняс інфраструктура анонсмен і фільм АІ. From the basic optics of the announcement, one might assume that this is some kind of ambitious federal moonshot, perhaps the result of a historic high-tech infrastructure bill. Maybe it's part of something called the Stargate Act? But none of that is the case. Stargate is a private initiative, Stargate LLC. A joint venture funded by American companies OpenAI and Oracle, as well as Japanese company SoftBank, and MGX, an AI investment firm owned by the government of Abu Dhabi.
At its core, Stargate is a tech industry power play by the hottest company in AI. Stargate will serve ChatGPT maker OpenAI as it builds increasingly powerful AI products. And while Stargate is currently investing in American facilities, the ambitions are global. On February 3rd, Sam Altman joined Masayoshi Sun on stage in Tokyo, where they discussed building out Stargate in Japan.
The stag it have to also expand into Japan because of the regulation w we have to respect the uh uh uh national security, the privacy law, blah blah. Yeah, South Bank is building a big data center here. Yes, yes. So we're gonna exp expand to run on that into Japanese infrastructure also, right?
Four days later, Altman told an audience in Berlin that he hopes to find a way to overcome regulatory hurdles in Europe in order to expand Stargate there.
Well, I very convinced that most Europeans want AI to be used here, to happen here. They want it to revitalize economic growth, they want to drive science, they want European infrastructure, and so do we. We would love to do um like a Stargate Europe. Um we need help, uh, but we'd love to build something here for Europe to govern and operate.
Beyond that, Emirati state owned investment firm MGX, which was not represented on stage at the press conference with President Trump, has a stated goal of quote enabling the AI fabric of the global economy. And on May 7th, OpenAI announced OpenAI for Countries, described as a new initiative within the Stargate project to quote, partner with countries to help build in-country data center capacity.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the Stargate project and why was it announced right after President Trump’s inauguration?
0:00–7:55
2
How did OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank and MGX come together to fund the $500 billion AI megafactory?
7:55–13:10
3
Why is Stargate expanding to Japan and Europe, and what regulatory hurdles are involved?
13:10–18:49
4
How is the Trump administration reshaping AI policy compared to the Biden era?
18:49–24:09
5
What role does the national energy emergency play in accelerating AI infrastructure?
24:09–31:54
6
How could Stargate’s massive compute capacity help cure cancer and other diseases?
31:54–33:04
Speakers
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