penAI brought online its first Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas, on September 23, 2025, marking a major milestone in the $500 billion AI infrastructure initiative announced alongside President Donald Trump in January.
Abilene Flagship Site
The Abilene campus, located 180 miles west of Dallas, is operational with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Nvidia chips. One building is running while a second is nearly complete. The site has potential to scale beyond one gigawatt of capacity—enough to power approximately 750,000 homes—according to OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar.
OpenAI began early training and inference workloads at the facility in June with the first Nvidia GB200 racks, using the capacity to advance next-generation research.
Five New Data Centers
OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank announced five additional Stargate sites across the United States:
Oracle-developed sites (over 5.5 gigawatts combined):
- Shackelford County, Texas
- Doña Ana County, New Mexico
- Wisconsin (in partnership with Vantage)
- Potential 600-megawatt expansion near Abilene
SoftBank-developed sites (1.5 gigawatts over 18 months):
- Lordstown, Ohio (groundbreaking complete, operational 2026)
- Milam County, Texas (with SB Energy providing powered infrastructure)
The combined capacity brings Stargate to nearly 7 gigawatts and over $400 billion in investment over three years, putting the project ahead of schedule to meet its 10-gigawatt, $500 billion commitment by year-end 2025. The sites were selected from over 300 proposals across 30 states and are expected to create more than 25,000 onsite jobs.
Funding Structure
OpenAI and Oracle entered an agreement in July to develop up to 4.5 gigawatts of additional Stargate capacity, representing a partnership exceeding $300 billion over five years. OpenAI will pay for computing capacity as an operating expense, funding construction through its projected $13 billion in 2025 revenue, cash flow, and debt financing.
Nvidia, which announced a separate $100 billion equity investment in OpenAI on September 22, will be paid for GPUs as they are deployed.
Infrastructure Scale
“What we see today is a massive compute crunch,” Friar said. “There’s not enough compute to do all the things that AI can do.”
The Stargate name now refers to all OpenAI infrastructure projects. Together with CoreWeave and other partners, the companies say they are ahead of schedule on their commitments. Construction underway today lays foundations for compute that will come online in 2026, starting with Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin chips.
Political Context
OpenAI and Oracle first unveiled Stargate at the White House in January alongside President Trump. In a Tuesday statement, the companies credited Trump’s leadership and administration policies with helping the project advance faster than expected and attract additional partners.
