On January 21, 2025, OpenAI announced the Stargate Project, “a new company which intends to invest 500 billion dollars over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States.” The announcement said the project “will begin deploying 100 billion dollars immediately” and was unveiled at the White House alongside the President.
SoftBank’s own press release names the roles and the partners. The “initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX,” with “Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI” as the key initial technology partners. On the division of labor, the release states that “SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility,” and names Masayoshi Son as chairman. Initial construction was described as already under way in Texas.
Stargate is the clearest single statement of the scale of capital now chasing AI compute. The headline figure - half a trillion dollars - dwarfs the 1 billion dollar Microsoft investment that anchored OpenAI’s commercial structure six years earlier, and signals that frontier AI had become an infrastructure race measured in data centers, power, and chips rather than in model checkpoints alone.
Note on sourcing: OpenAI’s own announcement page returns an HTTP 403 error to automated fetchers, so the OpenAI figures were corroborated through search against the canonical openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/ post. SoftBank’s own press release, which carries the identical text, was fetched and verified live and is cited as the primary corroboration.