Elon Musk on Wednesday criticized the massive private investment project in artificial intelligence (AI) presented the day before by Donald Trump, saying that the partners of this new joint venture “[n’avaient] not the money” to finance it.
During a major rally at the White House, the American president unveiled a joint company called “Stargate”, which plans to commit “at least $500 billion” to AI infrastructure in the United States.
Stargate brings together the “cloud” (remote computing) specialist Oracle, the Japanese investment giant SoftBank, and the generative AI start-up OpenAI (ChatGPT).
SoftBank boss Masayoshi Son said the joint venture would “start deploying $100 billion immediately,” with the goal of reaching a total of $500 over four years.
“They don’t have the money” to finance this project, Elon Musk proclaimed on his X account on Wednesday. “SoftBank is only insured with $10 billion,” he said, adding: “I I have it from a good source.”
The Tesla boss spent US$277 million out of his own pocket to finance Donald Trump’s campaign and was entrusted with an extra-governmental mission to cut public spending.
Stargate mainly focuses on the construction of data hosting and processing centers, the famous “data centers”.
The development of the cloud (remote computing) and AI, especially generative, requires immense data storage capacities, which has boosted the need for cutting-edge servers.
Co-investors in Stargate, OpenAI and Oracle are not investment companies and do not have sufficient financial capacity to contribute significantly.
Oracle’s spending on its data center network was only a few billion during its last financial year.
-In addition to SoftBank, Stargate’s financiers include the MGX investment fund, backed by the United Arab Emirates.
The players involved in Stargate released a brief press release on Tuesday, which gave no detailed information on the financial aspects of the project.
“I sincerely respect what you have achieved and I think you are the most inspiring entrepreneur of our time,” Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, soberly responded to Elon Musk on X.
The richest man in the world, who is one of the co-founders of OpenAI, regularly attacks Sam Altman, whom he accuses in particular of having subverted the initial mission of the start-up, focused on reasoned development of AI.
Elon Musk himself is involved in the AI race and the companies he controls, notably Tesla, have invested massively in this area.
His generative AI start-up, xAI, launched in 2023, wants to build a “giant computing factory” on a former industrial site in Memphis (Tennessee).
According to the Memphis Chamber of Commerce, once operational it will be the largest supercomputer in the world.
Joe Biden signed an executive order last week to accelerate the construction of new data centers specializing in AI in the United States.
