The Circuit with Emily ChangEmily Chang visits the Stargate site in Abilene, Texas for an exclusive first look at the historic $500 billion bet on the future of AI, announced by President Trump the day after his inauguration. She speaks with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about the project’s origin story, ambitions, and where this megafactory will take OpenAI next.
I'm here on the streets of Abilene, Texas, asking people if they've heard of something called Stargate. So have you heard of Stargate? I have?
Have you heard of Stargate?
Oh?
Have you heard of Project Stargate?
A little bit?
Not very much.
Until recently, I had not.
Yeah, I've heard just so just a smitch about it, that it was announced by Trump, and that's kind of really all that I've heard.
A year ago, if you asked me what stargate is, I might have said something like, oh, yeah, that's an extraterrestrial device that allows interplanetary travel by creating a wormhole between two ring shaped portals, as depicted in the nineteen ninety four film Stargate and the various television spinoffs.
How does she old of the Stargate?
But in twenty twenty.
Five, Stargate isn't just something you'll hear about from Jaffa Warriors, from Chulac. Now it's something you'll hear from a different type of TV personality, Stargate.
So put that name down in your books, because I think you're going to hear a lot about.
On January twenty first, President Trump flanked by oracles Larry Ellison, Open Ai, Sam Altman, and SoftBank's Macioshi Sun announced Stargate, an AI infrastructure project investing one hundred billion dollars in data center development and a stated intention of investing five hundred billion dollars over the next four years.
That's great that you're coming in together. That's a massive group of talent and money.
On Fox News, White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt pitched Stargate as a triumph for America and the Trump administration. President Trump is very excited about this infrastructure announcement in the field of AI. From the basic optics of the announcement, one might assume that this is some kind of ambitious federal moonshot, perhaps the result of a historic high tech infrastructure bill. Maybe it's part of something called the Stargate Act, but none of that is the case. Stargate is a private initiative. Stargate LLC, a joint venture fund by American companies open Ai and Oracle, as well as Japanese company SoftBank and MGX, an AI investment firm owned by the government of Abu Dhabi. At its core, Stargate is a tech industry powerplay by the hottest company in AI. Stargate will serve chatchipt maker open AI as it builds increasingly powerful AI products. And while Stargate is currently investing in American facilities, the ambitions are global.
Want to say this missed that.
On February third, Sam Altman joined Masiyoshi San on stage in Tokyo, where they discussed building out Stargate in Japan.
The Stargate have to also expand into Japan because of the regulation.
We have to respect.
The national security, the privacy.
Loo soft Bank is building a big data center here. Yes, yes, so we're going to expand. We're excited to surround on Stargate into Japanese infrastructure also right.
Four days later, Altmann told an audience in Berlin that he hopes to find a way to overcome regulatory hurdles in Europe in order to expand Stargate there.
Well, I'm very convinced that most Europeans want AI to be used here to happen here. They wanted to revitalize economic growth, they want to drive science, they want European infrastructure, and so do. We would love to do like a Stargate Europe. We need help, but we'd love to build something in here. For Europe that government.
Operate beyond that.
Amarati Staate owned investment firm MGX, which was not represented on stage at the press conference with President Trump, has a stated goal of quote enabling the AI fabric of the global economy, and on May seventh, OpenAI announced Open AI for Countries, described as a new initiative within the Stargate project to quote partner with countries to help build in country data center capacity. But even if the American public has no direct stake in Stargate, the ventures alliance with President Trump isn't superficial. The President has promised to use the power of the Executive Office to help Stargate cut any red tape that may stand in their way, an approach towards rapid AI development that marks a star change from the previous administration.
One thing is clear.
To realize the promise of AI and avoid the risk, we need to govern this technology.
President Biden that after signing an Executive Order on ntificial Intelligence, the most significant step today in regulating the technology. On the day he was inaugurated, President Trump sitting at a desk on stage at a rally like event in the Capitol One Arena in Washington, d c repealed President Biden's AI protections as part of a procession of new executive orders.
Could you imagine Biden doing this?
I don't think so.
And the very next day, President Trump sought to pave the way for rapid AI infrastructure expansion by declaring a national energy emergency. President Trump is declaring a national emergency in the US.
Well, this is a first for a president to declare a national energy emergency, and in short, we're not in one. In fact, most analysts say we have we're very close to having a short term oversupply of oil and gas in this country.
With a key Trump campaign promise.
Drill baby drill in a drill, baby drill.
Throughout his campaign, President Trump linked the needs of the AI industry with a call to increase energy production and deregulate the oil and gas industry.
AI is a big deal for us to compete successfully with China and others on AI, We're going to need twice the electricity that we currently produce.
Can you believe that the declaration of a National energy emergency is one of several tools that President Trump is using to try and help stargate bypass environmental protections and other regulations that may impede its rapid growth.
I will approve new drilling, new pipelines, new refineries, new power plants, new reactors, and we will slash the red tape.
We will get the job done.
We will create more electricity also for these new industries that can only function with massive electricity. And we'll get it done. And nobody else is even going to come to us, They won't even try.
Partnering with the Trump administration provides a crucial strategic advantage for open ai and its allies in the AI race, a green light to aggressively pilot their global ambitions on American soil, regardless of the consequences, and the first place they're breaking ground is in Abilene, Texas. The immediate downsides of this are measurable but arguably boring. Mainly, there will be a climate impact. Microsoft, which was open AI's exclusive cloud computing provider prietor Stargate, has admitted to significantly backsliding on its climate goals because of the AI boom. Here's what Microsoft president Brad Smith told Bloomberg about the company's climate goals.
In twenty twenty, we unveiled what we called our carbon moonshot our goal of being carbon negative by twenty thirty. That was before the explosion and artificial intelligence. So in many ways, as I say across Microsoft, the moon has moved. It's more than five times as far away as it was in twenty twenty. If you just think about our own forecast for the expansion of AI and its electrical needs.
And President Trump seems to take every opportunity to dissuade businesses from relying on renewable energy.
They can fuel it with anything they want, and they may have call as a backup, good clean call.
You know, the wind is wonderful if you like high costs, if you like having to replace the windmills every nine years. You know, they wear out, and they're very intermittent, and they do kill a hell of a lot of birds. If you want to see a lot of dead birds, go to a windmill and just look underneath the seat. Birds all over the place.
Nothing can destroy coal, not the weather, not a bomb, nothing. It might make it a little smaller, might make it a little different shape.
On the other hand, the long term upsides of the stargate facilities may be harder to quantify, but sound fantastically utopian. Here's Altman, echoing Larry Ellison's hope to use Stargate to cure cancer.
We will be amazed at how quickly we're carrying dis cancer, and that one in heart disease, and what this will do for the ability to deliver very high quality healthcare, the costs, but really to cure the diseases at a rapid rapid rate.
These kinds of monumental outcomes are of course yet to be proven, but one thing is certain. The build out of Stargate is happening.
On this week's.
Episode of The Circuit, I had a chance to tour the construction site of the new Stargate facilities being built in Abilene, Texas, and here on the podcast, we're sharing our extended interview with the man who arguably stands to gain the most from this venture, open Ai CEO Sam Alman. I sat down with Altman at open AI's headquarters in San Francisco a week after the launch of GPT four row's new image generation capabilities, a feature that went totally viral. I think our conversation revealed a lot about why he sees the success of Stargate as essential to continuing open AI's status as the leader in the field of AI.
So I saw what's happening in Appling with my own eyes. It's happening. It's happening. People look like they were working very hard and fast.
People never love what I show up for data center business. No, why A well, because I like have opinions about how you know, like it's not my area expertise, and yet I have opinions. And so people are like, Okay, you know we've thought about that before, Like is this Yes, we're going as fast as we can. Yes, we have tried this other kind of cool thing. Yes, we realized this is like a stupid way of doing it. We're trying to fix something exactly.
Whistlelone, take me back to the beginning before stargate. What did you start seeing that made you realize we need more compute, more power, more connectivity, that you were hitting a limit and needed to scale.
We we used to think a lot about the compute we would need to train the models, and what we didn't used to think about as much as how much people were going to use these models. I mean, we didn't think about it. Just turned out people want to use the models much more than we imagined. And a couple of years ago, maybe after the launch of GPT four in chatwipt, it really started to hit like, oh man, this is this is like gone from a lot of compute to like the biggest infrastructure project in history. And we started thinking about ways to do it, and we started trying to understand where the limits in the supply chain were, and out of that emerged Stargate. There were other smaller things that we did. First. We have, you know, worked with other partners. We've worked with Microsoft to build that like very gigantic amounts of compute. But you know, this is like the next step in that evolution, right.
I mean, you traveled around the world talking to people about this.
How did you get to talking with Masiyoshi's son and Larry Ellison and how did you all come together?
I'm well, I've known Massa for a long time, but I I was on in twenty twenty three. I did sort of two long trips. I think that was the year. That's all it's all about. I did two kind of long trips around the world, and a lot of it was to talk to developers and governments, but a lot of it was also to just really try to like get my head around the supply chain. This is not meaning I've done before, Like I had not before thought about like what it was going to take to get compute up and running at this scale. And there are a lot of like hard pieces. And on one of those trips I met with Masa. Masa has like thought for a long time about chip fabs in particular, but really kind of the whole thing that it takes. And we got to speaking about what it would you know, what it would take to do compute at this kind of scale. And then it took us a while to figure out. I mean it is a is a complex supply chain, a lot of partners and obviously a lot of capital, you.
Know, soft things.
Obviously your financial partner oracles a technical partner.
Why couldn't you get what you needed from Microsoft?
I mean, we do get a lot of great stuff from Microsoft, but I think this is more than anyone company can deliver. We have. Microsoft will do a lot of compute for us a lot long. We We're very happy about that.
Why call it stargate?
It began as a codename, and sometimes code names stick.
But it means something, right.
The design of one of the very early layouts of a data center looked a little bit like Stargate from.
The show A futuristic wormhole.
Not like that at all.
Okay, you announced this at the White House the day after the inauguration. How did this get to President Trump's desk and what was that moment?
Like, Well, the President is super interested in infrastructure, and he's made a big priority which I think is wonderful about permitting the energy production and the facilities for the data centers. So that was kind of how the conversation started.
Okay, we're in the middle of a step change for AI, and clearly what we saw just in the last week from you alone, you're seeing what's next on the roadmap. How does that inform what the design of the data centers of the future need to be.
I mean, I think there's like a lot of details we're learning about how to design these data centers, what you want really at all levels, from like the chip to the sort of architecture of whole data center. But the main thing that's been on my mind, and I think on many people's mind, is just how much inference demand there is. We are crazily constrained and we have a gigantic computer fleet, like gigantic, giantic and yet still if we had twice as much, we would be able to offer much better products and services, which just no shortage of demand. So for me, there are all the technical lessons about what we've learned and how we want to build this, but mostly we just want a lot.
Explain the math to us.
How does it all add up to needing five hundred billion dollars because folks out there don't get the accounting, who's putting in what, how much funding is really secured?
How does that add up in terms of like what do we need that for? How does the funding come together?
Like, explain that number? Five hundred billion?
Oh, well, that covers the capacity we think we need for the next few years given our growth projections. You know, we we The interesting question is if we had if we knew how to get a trillion dollars right now, which we don't, would we be able to deploy that profit in the next few years? And I'm not sure about that, but I feel confident we can like make five hundred billion of value back.
Let's talk about that, because you just raised even more money, you know, or right into open AI.
How confident? It's a lot of money, tens of billions of dollars.
How confident are you that open ai is going to be a financially sustainable and profitable enough company to justify all of this investment.
It's looking like we're doing really well. I mean, like we have to. We are definitely doing something unprecedented. But you know, it seems like good. Like I feel confident in the bed doesn't mean something can't go wrong.
You tweeted that the GPUs were melting you.
Yeah, I didn't realize we're gonna take that literally.
I mean, I get that it was a joke, but it ran very hot.
But like the metal is not actually melting.
GPU shortage, bro that the team can't sleep, you're so busy. What happens when a launch goes viral? And how does stargate solve for this?
Well, first of all, this level of my route, this is an unusual thing this last week. I don't think this has happened in the history of tech to any company before, like the I don't know of any I've seen viral moments, but I have never seen anyone have to deal with an influx usage like this.
You added a million users in an hour or something.
With yeah, I mean more some hours. But yeah, it was like a it was like unprecedented wild and also like making an image is not a it's not exactly like a low compute task the way we do it with the new image then, so we had to do a lot of very unnatural things. We had to you know, borrow compute capacity for research. We had to slow down some other features because it's not like we have like hundreds of thousands of GPUs sitting around just like spinning idly. So with if we had more GPUs, we would be more able to handle demandswer just like this, and also we wouldn't have to put such restrictions on I was just this morning making the list of what we have what we'd like to launch in the next few months, and I was like, you know, I had the list over here, and I had like my rough math of when we're getting GPUs here and where I thought we could get the efficiency games, and I was like, this is not gonna work. Like we're gonna have to like pull some of these things, make some trail of limits, some things I don't like, but this is not all of this is not going to fit here.
So it's that directly linked.
Yeah. I mean you can find efficiency gains and we chart to do. You can limit features and usage and we do that too. But you know, more compute means we can give you more AI and you can use it for images or write softwareor whatever you want.
Elon's got his own data centers and XAI just bought x which means he's got access to all of that additional data.
He claims Grock is the smartest AI on Earth. How do you think it compares?
I don't use it much. I think it's probably a very good model.
I mean, obviously there are lots of competitors out.
There, there's a lot of good models. I think I think good models will become very bountiful, very plentiful.
So what's your edge going to be the best.
Infrastructural air and the best top of the stack. You know, we have way more people use chatpt than use any other AI service, way more, and I think you'll see with a lot of the new futures we roll out that will become more of an advantage over time.
So, once this is all built, what's the grand vision?
Give people tools to let them do whatever they're going to do better. You know this is in some sense this is like it is different this time, But in many other senses, this is just like another tool and another piece of technological history. People will use it and unuse their creative energy and make all sorts of stuff that you and I love, or some stuff that we don't, or stuff that just entertain themselves personally. The area I'm most excited about is air for scientific discovery. I think that will you know, we're not there yet, but we're not far away. I think twenty twenty five will be a world where we have agents do a lot of work, but work of the kind of work and things we already know how to do. I'm hopeful that twenty twenty six will be a big year of like really new scientific progress.
Do you envision multiple stargets on every continent? Like where else are we going to see you break ground?
You will see them on in the comments?
Yes everywhere, I don't know.
Mind everywhere, Like this is like you want to visit on this These are hard things to do.
Well, Look, this is an audacious bet on the future. What are the risks?
I mean, maybe you know people stop wanting to like pay for AI services and then we have a difficult financial position. Mm hmm.
How do you feel about one chip maker in Nvidia having so much power over the industry, the future of the industry.
They make an incredible product, and if you make an incredible product, then people want it. This is what happens to you.
I do want to talk about the jobs then, because obviously we saw so many people working there. There's this lofty promise that AI data centers are going to create thousands and thousands of jobs. Meantime, AI is destroying jobs elsewhere, and I feel like even you know, there is serious anxiety out there. People are scared totally, even among the best engineers and technologists, people are scared.
What do you say to those people?
AI is for sure going to change a lot of jobs, totally take some jobs away, create a bunch of nuance. This is like the kind of this is what happens with technology. In fact, I think if you look at the history of the world, like technological driven job change or whatever you call it, when like one class of jobs go away, another one pop up, like that's very consistent. It happens to it's punctuated, but like that's just been happening for a long time. And the thing that is different this time is just the rate with which it looks like it will happen. The thing I think the world is not ready for, Like people have maybe abstractly thought like, Okay, it's going to be a better programmer than me, it's going to be you know, better at customer support and whatever. I don't think the world has really had the humanoid robots moment yet, and I don't think that's very far away, so from like a visceral like, oh man, this is going to do a lot of things that people used to do. So yeah, it's commune, and we have always tried to just be super honest about what I think the impact may be, realizing that will be wrong on a lot of details.
What happens when the humanoid robots get here.
I mean, they'll obviously do a lot of jobs. But the point I was trying to make is I think, like the first day you're like walking down the street and there's like seven robots that walk past you doing things or whatever, it's going to feel very sci fi.
Deep Seek appears to have found a more efficient way to power AI. Was that a moment of rethink for you? And are you doing anything differently.
Now, I think the deep CPAM is very talented and did a lot of good things. I don't think they've figured out something like way more efficient than.
We figured out, But do you think there is a more efficient way to.
Will? We have made incredible efficiency strides here every year, and I'm sure we'll keep doing that in the future.
So if that's the case, why are you building all this?
If we had an AI that we could offer at one tenth of the price of current AI, I think people would use it twenty times as much, and we would still need twice as much compute to say, to despide the then current demand.
So let's talk about that Jevins paradox, Like, how do you think Jevins paradox applies here? That you know, technological progress means paradoxically you're going to be using more resources, doesn't.
It doesn't. This never seemed like a paradox to me at all. Like, you know, we talk about supply demand curves and elasticity and all sorts of other things, and then people are like, ah, but I'm in a tricky with Jevins paradox, and it's like, this is just the way the world works.
Most of the time, But you do think there will be more efficient ways.
What are those things? Is it better chips?
Is it is all of the above. It we will have better chips, we will have better energy sources, we will have better algorithms. We will optimize. I mean this is just this is like what industry does. We will optimize everything.
There's no question that China is going to be a formidable for sure in AI. How do you think about opening eyed chances to win a global race?
You know, probably actually have some deep thoughts of about that we're doing the best we can, Like we just wake up every day thing how we can be a little bit better? I don't know how to like, I don't know how our actions would change based off of like some deep answer to that question.
President Trump is in power at a pivotal time for AI development.
What do you think his mark on this moment will be.
I think he will get to make some of the most important decisions anyone in the world has gotten to make related to AI. And you know, I'm optimistic he's really he'll really do the right thing there. But I don't like his an unineviewable job.
Right the velocity of we were talking about a launch. Is the velocity of innovation here is just mind blowing. The speed at which you're releasing new things, the speed of what's coming at what I saw of rising from the red dirt in Abilene. How do you personally grapple with the pace of it all.
That's one thing that's really impressed me about President Trump, by the way, is his ability to just like understand the whole industry and all the changes and quickly seem to have very good intuition and make good decisions about it while things are changing so fast. Has really been quite impressive to me.
But what about you personally?
Yeah, I was gonna say, I I'm in it every day, and so I don't like it's like watching your own kid grow. Like you, day to day you just see every change, and so it's like not as striking. It does feel like it's going very fast. It's certainly I certainly think if I could like transport myself back three years ago, it would seem like unimaginable progress. But you know, day to day you can kind of get used to anything.
Well, since you mentioned kids, you just had a baby, has that reframed anything for you?
Total?
I mean, like look, I don't think I had anything non cliche to say here, but it's the best, most amazing thing ever, and it totally rewired all of my priorities. I remember and like the first hour I felt this neurochemical change and it happened so fast. I was like, oh, I get to like observe this, like I am being like neurochemically hacked, but I'm like noticing it happening, and I'm totally fine with this is worth it, This is great, But like everything is going to be different now?
What about how everything that you're doing here and building all this, what it means for humanity?
Has it reframed any of that?
A lot of people have said, I'm very happy you're having a kid because I think you'll make better I think you'll make better decisions to whatever degree you have, Like a, you got to make decisions here for humanity as a whole. I really wanted to get it right before, do the best I could. I still really want to now it Uh it's somehow, Yes, it somehow does feel like it's different, but I can't articulate how.
H All right, So we talked about the pace, the breakthroughs. You know, I think you know, the fear and the anxiety out there.
As you keep moving forward.
If chat ChiPT were to discover a stargate, a futuristic wormhole that we could all travel through, what's on the other side, Like, what do you see that.
The rest of us?
Don't you have touch your particulate like transports to the future.
Yeah, through a stargate a wormhole? Please humor me on the world?
No idea, I mean, no one knows right like it's gonna it's going to discover like AI. I believe AI will help dramatically, like unbelievably dramatically accelerate the pace of science and human discovery and our understanding of what's possible. But like, do I think I could have sat here in nineteen oh five and told you what we were about to discover in physics and that forty years later we would like have an atomic Definitely not. And I think I am way too self aware of my own limitations to sit here and try to say I can tell you us on the other side of that one. I have no idea.
But not good, yes, happy, better, a better world.
Up and down, not better in every way, but yeah, I think up into the right to the right with some choppiness. Thank you, thank you.
Probably the most prominent skeptic of stargate is Elon Musk.
Just hours after Donald Trump announced this project and declared it would create one hundred thousand new jobs quote, almost immediately, Elon Musk slammed the initiative and suggested it will never get off the ground.
Musk, of course, was a co founder of Open and has since severed ties. He now runs his own competing AI company, Xai, and has become one of Sam Altman's fiercest critics.
Now you're seeing maybe a little bit of a faltering in the bromance between Elon Musk and Donald.
Trump, because Sam Altman is now getting in the picture.
Surely Elon Musk's AI ambitions also stand to gain from Trump's deregulatory actions. It's no secret where Musk's political allegiances lie.
I'm not just.
Naga, I'm dog Gothic maga. But Sam Altman is a less obvious ally for the Trump administration. In a twenty sixteen blog post mainly about President Trump's views on immigrants, Altman wrote that quote to anyone familiar with the history of Germany in the nineteen thirties. It's chilling to watch Trump in action, and yet just one day after Trump's second inauguration, Altman is the one standing next to the President announcing his ambitious plans to dominate the hottest emergent industry in the world.
We wouldn't be able to do this without you, mister President, and I'm thrilled that we get to.
Bloomberg recently reported that three months after the Stargate announced, SoftBank has yet to successfully raise funds for the project, with factors like tariffs, economic volatility, and fears of overcapacity making the investment a hard cell. But Sam Altman clearly has his site set on a very big goal. On May eighth, he announced Instacart CEO Fijisimo would be joining open Ai as CEO of Applications, saying quote, I'll remain CEO of open Ai, but in this new configuration, I'll be able to increase my focus on research, compute, and safety. These are critical as we approach superintelligence. If you'd like to see this target construction in Texas, you could check out the circuit on Bloomberg TV or the Bloomberg Originals channel on YouTube. We had a very rare interview with soft Bank CEO Masayoshi's Sun.
This is amazing, explosive rose of ins.
We talked to residents and elected officials in Ablene, Texas. The big picture to me is AI is going to take over and then where are we as humans? And we toured the site of the first Stargate facilities with Chase lock Miller, the CEO and co founder of Crusoe, the company managing the build out.
Why a lot of this development is taking place in Texas that Urkhot is the most deregulated grid, it's sort of the easiest to get approval.
There's a lot in there, so definitely check it out. This has been the Circuit podcast. If you'd like to hear more extended interviews like this, please rate and review our show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, or you can always just share it with a friend. Our senior producer is Lauren Ellis. Our writer and editor is Billy Disney. I'm Emily Chank, your host and executive producer. Thanks for listening.
