WASHINGTON – President Trump announced on Tuesday a private sector investment of up to $500 billion to build artificial intelligence infrastructure, aiming to outpace rival nations in the business-critical technology.
Trump said the joint venture, called Stargate, will build data centers and create more than 100,000 jobs in the United States. ChatGPT creator OpenAI, Softbank and Oracle, along with other equity backers of Stargate, have committed $100 billion for immediate deployment, with the remaining investment expected over the next four years.
And CEOs Masayoshi Son of SoftBank and Sam Altman of OpenAI CEO along with Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison joined Trump at the White House for the launch.
“Immediately, Stargate will be building the physical and virtual infrastructure to power the next generation of advancements in AI,” said Trump. “And this will include the construction of colossal data centers.”
Ellison said the first of the project’s data centers are currently under construction in Texas. Twenty will be built, half a million square feet each, he said.
The “most charismatic” application of AI, said Ellison, would pertain to electronic health records, which would let doctors monitor best practices in far flung places. For instance, a doctor in Indian River reservation would be able to see how a doctor at Memorial Sloan Kettering would a treat a patient, he said.
It was not immediately clear whether the announcement was an update to a previously reported venture.
In March 2024, tech news website The Information reported OpenAI and Microsoft were working on plans for a $100 billion data center project that would include an artificial intelligence supercomputer also called “Stargate” set to launch in 2028.
Trump was all in on the innovation AI would herald.
“AI seems to be very hot. It seems to be the thing that a lot of smart people are looking at very strongly. And our country will be prospering like never before,” said Trump. “It is going to be the golden age of America.”
Why data centers? AI data centers take lots of power
AI requires enormous computing power, pushing demand for specialized data centers that let tech companies to link thousands of chips together in clusters.
“They have to produce a lot of electricity, and we’ll make it possible for them to get that production done very easily at their own plants if they want,” Trump said.
As U.S. power consumption rises from AI data centers and the electrification of buildings and transportation, about half of the country is at increased risk of power supply shortfalls in the next decade, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation said in December.
Gary Reber Comments:
What is never revealed the concentrated ownership of these joint private sector/government investment projects, which receive government incentives. As set, these massive AI data centers will be owned by the already rich, who will become richer. The promotion is the job creation, of course, as the vast majority (the 99 percent) are subject to a wage system and do not have practical access to the means of financing productive capital asset formation, such as this AI investment, and never become productive capital owners.
America needs a discussion on how to turn every citizen into a product capital owner.
We live in a county governed by the wealthy who own virtually all of the non-human productive capital that creates our goods and services. Ir is called a plutocracy. Those who are do not own this wealth are subject to dependency on a wage system and are not capital owners themselves. With advancing technology constantly knocking on the door, economic insecurity is at the other side. What is the solution. It is a generational solution which provides equal opportunity for every citizen-individual to have access to and the means to acquire income-generating and wealth-building productive capital assets whose purchase is financed with new money that is backed by the assets created, that is issued by the FederaL Reserve commercial banking system. The new capital credit loans would be paid back solely with interest-free, bank insured, pre-tax earnings of the asset investments. There would be no requirement on the part of the individual citizen to put up and pledge any money or assets. The capital asset acquisition would start at birth, or anytime time of age, to death, enabling long-term income generation and wealth building.
The rich and the oligarchs are rich and powerful because they have and continue to concentrate among themselves ever more productive, income and wealth generating capital assets (the non-human factor of production) while the vast majority of Americans are wage slaves stuck in a wage system of growing insecurity as advancing technology eliminates the necessity for masses of human labor to produce goods and services.
Productive capital ownership is power. Instead of a wage system whereby virtually all Americans are dependent on increasingly insecure jobs due to advancing technology, every citizen should be turned into a productive capital owner.
My new, award-winning book OWN Turning Every Citizen Into A Productive Owner addresses the problem of concentrated capital ownership with less than 10 percent of the citizenry owning America and the more than 90 percent relegated to a wage system to earn income or government welfare dependency. Proposed are solutions to massive economic inequality, globalization, the mis-guided minimum wage and unionization movements, wage system dependency and tectonic shifts in the technologies of production that destroy jobs and devalue labor. Proposed are financial mechanisms and reforms to the tax, and monetary and credit systems to broaden capital ownership simultaneously with the growth of the economy. This new paradigm will enable the people of the United States to build a future economy that can support general affluence for every citizen. As a result, capital ownership would become an integral part of earning income and building wealth while ever-advancing technology eliminates the necessity for a massive workforce and jobs for those workers. The proposed Economic Democracy Act will create equal opportunity access and the means to acquire capital using self-liquidating insured, interest-free capital credit for every citizen, every year from birth to death, to become a productive capital owner in the technological frontier. Without such universal citizen access to the financial means to acquire capital with interest-free, insured capital credit, and the ability to repay those capital loans with the future pre-tax earnings of the capital itself, the increasing concentration of wealth and capital-generated income will accelerate, as advancing technology replaces labor as a productive input.