US President Donald Trump and the CEOs of OpenAI, Softbank and Oracle announced on Tuesday evening an investment of $100 billion – with plans to reach $500 billion – into the Stargate artificial intelligence infrastructure project.
The announcement makes a mockery of the EU’s efforts to catch up in the AI race, dwarfing its ‘flagship’ €2 billion AI Factories initiative.
Stargate is “the largest AI infrastructure project by far in history,” said Trump in a White House press briefing, together with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son and Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison.
The funding will be used to build up to 20 massive data centres with specilised computing power to fuel the creation and use of next generation artificial intelligence.
While the European Commission often repeats that its public computing project, EuroHPC, holds three of the top 10 supercomputers in the world, Euractiv reported that this is based on a non-exhaustive list, and that EuroHPC data centres are in fact outmatched 20 to 1 by private US companies.
The companies, together with tech investor MGX, have already committed $100 billion in funding, with plans to increase investments to $500 billion over the next four years.
The Washington Post reported that a person familiar with the matter said this does not include public funds. Instead, the government will likely help streamline the process of approving land use and sufficient electricity and water to power the data centres.
“We certainly couldn’t do this without you,” Ellison told Trump during the press conference
The EU’s flagship AI Factories initiative amounts to a total of €1.96 billion ($2.04 billion) combined EU and member state funding, attempting to compensate for a lack of private investment.
Academics and think tanks have been calling for a €100 billion European “CERN for AI” project for years, but there are no signs that the announced AI Research Council will be anywhere near this scale.
The EU’s main research and innovation funding programme, Horizon Europe, stands at €93.5 billion for 2021-27. Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation Ekaterina Zaharieva recently told Science Business that the €220 billion budget recommended for 2028-34 after an independent review is “unrealistic”.
Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI are the key technology providers for Stargate, according to an OpenAI press release.
“I think this will be the most important project of this era” Altman said.