OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined President Donald Trump and leaders of SoftBank and Oracle yesterday to tout Stargate, a $500 billion plan to build data centers in the U.S. to power the expected soaring use of AI in the coming years. Altman called Stargate, which will get an up-front investment of $100 billion from OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and the Emirati AI investor MGX, the “most important project of this era.”
Whether or not you agree with him, Stargate is arguably the tech industry’s biggest gamble ever. After all, in addition to the eye-popping price tag and the astronomical energy needs (possibly rivaling the electricity demands of entire cities), the massive investment has zero guarantee of return. Given that today’s AI is a generalized technology in its infancy, no one knows how to make money from it at such an enormous scale. And further, while OpenAI may believe that Stargate is “critical” to developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) that will “benefit all of humanity,” the truth is there is not even an agreed-upon definition of AGI (the most common definition is AI that’s equal to humans at certain critical tasks). And even if there was consensus, Ethan Mollick, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, pointed out on X that there is “still no articulated vision of what a world with AGI looks like for most people.” For those who believe AGI is coming soon, he wrote, “what does daily life look like 5-10 years later?”
