Donald Trump: what is “Stargate”, his AI project with “at least $500 billion” in investments?

Donald Trump’s presentation was made at the White House, in the presence of the directors of these three companies. On Tuesday, the American president announced a new artificial intelligence (AI) project, called “Stargate”.

This project includes investments of“at least 500 billion dollars” in AI infrastructures in the United States. Stargate brings together the specialist in “cloud” (remote computing) Oracle, Japanese investment giant SoftBank, and generative AI startup OpenAI. In addition to SoftBank, Oracle and OpenAI, “Stargate” is financially supported by the MGX investment fund, backed by the United Arab Emirates.

“Data centers” and creation of thousands of jobs

The president and co-founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison, revealed that the project mainly focused on the construction of hosting and data processing centers, the famous “data centers”. “The first ones are already under construction in Texas”near Abilene (northeast), shared the leader.

The development of “cloud”AI in general and generative AI in particular, requires immense data storage capacities, which has increased the need for “data centers”. Donald Trump assured that the creation of “Stargate” would create “almost immediately more than 100,000 jobs” in the United States.

“Physical and virtual infrastructures”

This new joint company “will build the physical and virtual infrastructures to carry the next generation of AI,” said the American president. The partners want to bring together, around “Stargate”, “companies in the data center infrastructure sector, from energy supply to real estate, including construction and equipment”according to the press release. Masayoshi Son, boss of SoftBank, specified that the American semiconductor giant Nvidia was a partner in the project. These investmentsare money that normally would have gone to China or other countries, but more specifically to China.”said Donald Trump.

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Biden executive order on AI security canceled

On the eve of this presentation, Donald Trump had canceled an executive order issued by his predecessor Joe Biden on AI security, a gesture interpreted as a transition towards a more moderate regulatory approach. Stargate marks a turning point for the generative AI prodigy OpenAI, which had until now relied on the infrastructure of its partner Microsoft and will now be able to count on its own data centers. OpenAI nevertheless took care to say that it “(continued) his work with Microsoft”, which is its 49% shareholder.