On the evening of Jan. 21, 2025, President Trump on his first full day in office unveiled what he characterized as a “monumental undertaking” that would prove an exemplar of economic triumphs to come, and that he himself orchestrated. From a podium framed by the Roosevelt Room’s white-columned fireplace, Trump announced the formation of the Stargate Project, a head-spinningly huge, $500 billion joint venture that he lauded as “the biggest AI infrastructure project by far in history, all taking place right here in America … that will ensure the future of technology.” Shoulder-to-shoulder to the left of the POTUS stood three superstars of the AI firmament representing, in the host’s words, “a massive group of talent and money”—the principal Stargate partners, Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison, OpenAI chief Sam Altman, and founder and CEO of Japan’s SoftBank, Masayoshi Son.
The first of the guests to speak was Ellison, who declared that Stargate would revolutionize health-tech by building applications that enable the sharing of electronic records “so that a doctor at an Indian reservation would be able to see how a doctor at [New York’s] Memorial Sloan Kettering or at Stanford would treat the patient,” as well as contribute to the development of wonder drugs that would vaccinate humans against cancer. Next up was Son, who gushed that “this is the beginning of the golden age in America” and assured Trump that “we wouldn’t have decided [to go forward] unless you won.” Altman hailed Stargate “as the most important project of this era,” and turning toward Trump, asserted: “We wouldn’t have been able to do this without you.”
